Jan Morris was a Welsh historian, author and travel writer, best known for her travel writing on Venice and Trieste and the Pax Britannica trilogy about the British Empire.
Born James Morris in 1926, she began writing for the Times after the Second World War and was the only journalist present during Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay’s 1953 ascent of Everest. The first volume of Morris’s travel writing, Coast to Coast, was published in 1956 with her classic account of Venice appearing four years later.
In 1964 she started the process of transitioning from a man to a woman, undergoing sex reassignment surgery in Morocco in 1972. She was one of the first high-profile figures to do so and the transition was covered in her 1974 memoir Conundrum – her first book under her new name.
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