Welsh writer Jan Morris has had an incredibly long and illustrious career, and a fascinating, eventful life. Now 88, and the author of more than forty books on travel and history, she lived the first 46 years of her life as James Morris. She has said she always believed herself to have been born into the wrong body.
As James, she began her career in journalism, travelling to Mt Everest in 1953 with Ed Hillary and Tenzing Norga; becoming the first to get the news of the successful climb to the world using a coded message.
She married Elizabeth Tuckniss and the couple had five children, before she underwent gender reassignment surgery in Morroco in 1972. She and Elizabeth were then forced to divorce because the law did not permit them to live as married women. The couple are still together, entering a civil partnership in 2008.
Jan Morris’s latest book, which she says is her last, is Ciao, Carpaccio!
Photo by David Hurn
