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A spirited and truly compelling literary biography of the immortal travel writer, journalist and twentieth-century trans pioneer, Jan Morris.
When Jan Morris joined the 1953 Everest expedition and was first to get news of the ascent back to the young Queen Elizabeth in London, she became the most famous journalist in the world overnight. So began a glittering career that saw her cover the Eichmann trial, interview Che Guevara and scoop the story of Suez collusion.
Morris transitioned in the early seventies, and documented the experience in Conundrum, still considered a classic of trans literature today. She was a trailblazer adored around the globe and her books, including Venice and the Pax Britannica trilogy, have inspired hundreds of thousands of readers.
In these pages, celebrated travel writer and biographer Sara Wheeler uncovers the complexity of this twentieth-century icon to reveal a mosaic of contradictions. Morris conjured the spirit of place in her work, yet her late masterpiece Trieste celebrates "the meaning of nowhere; she was a Welsh nationalist who wasn't Welsh; and a preacher of kindness with a cruel side.
Drawing on unprecedented access to Morris's papers as well as interviews with family, friends and colleagues, Wheeler assembles a captivating portrait of her astonishing life—a story of longing, traveling and never reaching home.
"A sensitive, empathetic, and measured biography." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A sensitive, empathetic, and measured biography." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Wheeler beautifully captures the excitement, the paradoxes, and the utter lightness of being Jan Morris." —Booklist (starred review)
"A thorough and competent biography." —Publishers Weekly
This information about Jan Morris was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sara Wheeler is an award-winning and bestselling travel writer and biographer, and a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio; like Jan Morris, she has spent half her working life on the road. Her eleven books include Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica and Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a contributing editor of the Literary Review. She lives in London.
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