Jan Morris

About Jan Morris

One of the more interesting people on our list of top travel writers is Jan Morris., who passed away in 2020 at the age of 94.  She had a legendary career as a Welsh journalist, historian and author, known best for her portraits of cities like Venice, Hong Kong, Oxford, Trieste, and New York City, and for the Pax Britannica trilogy on the history of the British Empire.  Morris was assigned male at birth and known as James Morris; she had a sex reassignment surgery in Morocco in 1972.  After the war, Morris wrote for the The Times, getting the opportunity to accompany the 1953 British expedition with Edmund Hilary who made first successful ascent of Mount Everest.  Morris was the first to report the success, sending a coded message back to the newspaper to preserve the scoop and to secure a release of the news on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.  She tells the story of this trip in her book Coronation Everest.  Morris is often referred to as one of the world’s greatest travel writers, both for the quantity of her work and the brilliance of her prose.