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Jan Morris, artful travel writer who broke many boundaries, dies at 94

As a young reporter, Jan Morris was on the mountainside, at 22,000 feet, when the first expedition in history reached the top of Mount Everest. She reported on wars and revolutions around the globe, published dozens of elegant books exploring far-flung places and times and was regarded as perhaps the greatest travel writer of her time.

Yet the most remarkable journey of her life was across a private border, when she cast off her earlier identity as James Morris and became Jan Morris.

A writer of extraordinary range and productivity, and one of the world’s first well-known transgender public figures, Ms. Morris was 94 when she died Nov. 20 at a hospital in the Welsh town of Pwllheli. Her son Twm Morys announced the death in a statement but did not state the cause.

Jan Morris spent her first 45 years as James Morris, who had been a British cavalry officer, a World War II veteran and a dashing reporter renowned for international adventures and evocative writing.

“On the face of things,” a onetime colleague, David Holden, wrote in 1974, “a less likely candidate for a sex change than James Morris would have been hard to imagine. His whole career and reputation had created an aura of glamorous and successful masculinity.”

In the 1940s, James Morris lived on the Nile on the houseboat of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. In 1953, never having climbed a mountain before, James joined the expedition of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay and came within 7,000 feet of the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak. Scrambling back down, James delivered the news that Everest had been conquered for the first time in history. The Times of London printed the story on the eve of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

“I went up an unknown,” Ms. Morris told the New York Times in 1997, “and came down the most famous journalist in the world.”

Constantly on the move, James Morris reported from Israel, Algeria, South Africa and Japan, primarily for British newspapers and magazines, published books and was praised by New York Times critic Orville Prescott as a “poet and a phrase-maker with a fine flair for the beauties of the English language.”

James Morris covered the Moscow show trial of U.S. spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers and the trial in Jerusalem of unrepentant Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann. In Cuba, James interviewed the charismatic revolutionary Che Guevara and in a 1960 dispatch published in the New York Times offered a grim assessment of what the future would hold for the country under Fidel Castro. ”

“It is a strikingly immature regime — not just in age but in style and judgment too. The rulers of Havana reduce all things to simple right or wrong, East or West, in or out, yours or ours. There still is good in many of their notions, a surviving streak of idealism, a genuine quality of young inspiration. But there is little subtlety, no experience, and scarcely a jot of that prime political commodity, irony.”

In 1960, James Morris published the best-selling “Venice” (called “The World of Venice” in the United States), creating a distinctive style of travel writing, a literary dreamscape evoking past and present at once, as sensory impressions and a poignant awareness of what some called the “psychology of place” were threaded into an elegant, flowing prose.

Venice — for centuries an independent republic before it became part of Italy — “was something unique among the nations, half eastern, half western, half land, half sea, poised between Rome and Byzantium, between Christianity and Islam, one foot in Europe, the other paddling in the pearls of Asia. She . . . even had her own calendar, in which the year began on March 1st, and the days began in the evening.”

Other books followed, about New York, Britain, South America and Spain, as well as an ambitious three-volume history of the British Empire that was so authoritatively written that critics were reminded of Edward Gibbon’s monumental 18th-century chronicle of ancient Rome.

James Morris had public acclaim and a seemingly contented family life as the married father of four children — but there remained a central, inescapable fact: a misaligned gender identity, “a life distorted.”

“I was three or perhaps four years old,” Jan Morris wrote in her first book under that name, the autobiographical “Conundrum” (1974), “when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well” — sitting under the piano, while her mother played Sibelius — “and it is the earliest memory of my life.”

Before marrying Elizabeth Tuckniss in 1949, James Morris explained this sense of inner conflict, telling her that “each year my every instinct seemed to become more feminine, my entombment within the male physique more terrible to me.”

James Morris began hormone treatments in 1964 and consulted with Harry Benjamin , an American physician and the author of “The Transsexual Phenomenon” (1966). In 1972, James went to Casablanca for transition surgery, choosing a doctor experienced in the procedure.

Two weeks later, Jan Morris flew back to England, where she was greeted by Elizabeth. Under British law at the time, they had to obtain a divorce because same-sex couples were not permitted to marry. Still, they continued to live together.

“To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial,” Ms. Morris wrote in “Conundrum,” which became an international best seller. “It is the essentialness of oneself, the psyche, the fragment of unity. Male and female are sex, masculine and feminine are gender, and though the conceptions obviously overlap, they are far from synonymous.”

Many readers admired Ms. Morris’s revelatory candor, but others were confused or hostile. In Esquire magazine, Nora Ephron disparaged “Conundrum” as “a mawkish and embarrassing book. . . . Jan Morris is perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is exactly what James Morris wanted to become those many years ago. A girl. And worse, a 47-year-old girl.”

In any case, Ms. Morris continued with her writing life much as before, only wearing skirts, necklaces, a nimbus of graying hair and a perpetual smile.

She completed the final volume of the British Empire trilogy and continued to wander the globe, writing for Rolling Stone and other publications. The books seem to pour out of her, often with simple titles such as “Travels,” “Journeys,” “Destinations” and “Among the Cities.”

She became almost a revered figure, considered a founder of modern travel writing, even though she resisted the title.

“The reason why I don’t regard myself as a travel writer is that the books have never tried to tell somebody what a city is like,” she told the Independent in 2001. “All I do is say how I’ve felt about it, how it impinged on my sensibility.”

Ms. Morris was often asked which city in the world, out of the hundreds she knew, was her favorite. She invariably named Manhattan and Venice, both of which she visited every year.

But she also had an abiding attachment to Trieste, a somewhat eccentric port city in northeastern Italy. Ms. Morris first saw Trieste in 1945, then returned periodically over the years before publishing in 2001 what she considered perhaps her finest travel book, “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere.”

“The nostalgia that I felt here 50 years ago was, I realize now, nostalgia not for a lost Europe, but for a Europe that never was, and has yet to be,” she wrote. “But we can still hope and try, and be grateful that we are where we are, in this ever-marvelous and fateful corner of the world.”

James Humphry Morris was born Oct. 2, 1926, in Clevedon, England.

At 17, James Morris joined the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers , a storied British cavalry unit, and served in Italy and the Middle East during World War II. James later worked for a news agency in Cairo, then returned to Britain to study at the University of Oxford, graduating in 1951.

After working for the Times of London for several years, James joined what was then the Manchester Guardian in 1956 as “wandering correspondent,” winning a George Polk Award for journalism in 1960. A year later, James became a freelance writer and received a master’s degree in English literature from Oxford.

It was in Oxford where James Morris made the first tentative steps toward becoming Jan, going out in public wearing dresses and makeup, years before athletes Renée Richards and Caitlyn Jenner were heralded as transgender pioneers.

In 2008, Ms. Morris and Elizabeth Tuckniss Morris were united in a civil union.

“I made my marriage vows 59 years ago and still have them,” Elizabeth Morris told Britain’s Evening Standard. “We are back together again officially. After Jan had a sex change we had to divorce. So there we were. It did not make any difference to me. We still had our family. We just carried on.”

They settled in the Welsh village of Llanystumdwy, with one of their sons living next door. The couple arranged for a headstone with an inscription in Welsh and English: “Here are two friends, at the end of one life.”

In addition to Elizabeth Morris and their son, Twm Morys, survivors include three other children. Another child, a daughter, died in infancy.

If anything, Jan Morris was a more productive writer than James had been. She often published two or three books a year, and more than 45 in all. Besides her accounts of travel, history and autobiography, she wrote two novels and biographical studies of Abraham Lincoln and British admiral John Fisher.

In 2018, she published “Battleship Yamato,” about an ill-fated Japanese warship that was sunk in 1945. It was believed to be one of the last books about World War II written by a veteran of the war. She continued to publish essays about her life in Wales, her memories and what she called the “tangled web” of her life until shortly before her death.

“I spent half my life traveling in foreign places,” Ms. Morris wrote in “Conundrum.” “I did it because I liked it, and to earn a living, and I have only lately recognized that incessant wandering as an outer expression of my inner journey.”

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Jan Morris, the Celebrated Travel Writer Who Elegantly Chronicled Her Own Journey of Transition, Dies at 94

By Stuart Emmrich

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Jan Morris, who spent the first half of her life as James Morris, a journalist who found global fame chronicling Sir Edmund Hillary’s historic ascent of Mount Everest, and then the second as a celebrated essayist and one of the most famous transgender women in the world, died Friday at the age of 94.

No matter what topic Morris covered over the course of her nearly eight-decade career—from travel to history to her own transition—she did so with insight, elegance and unflinching honesty. As one reviewer wrote when her landmark memoir, Conundrum, was reissued in 2006 with a new introduction by Morris, “ Conundrum remains an exquisite read — a rare gift of empathic insight into an experience which most of us will never have but which is strewn with elements of the struggle for belonging, acceptance, and authenticity that most of us face daily in one form or another.” Her death was confirmed by her son, Twm Morys , who said his mother died in a hospital near the Welsh village of Llanystumdwy, where she lived. He did not name the cause.

Over the course of her career, Morris published more than 30 books, their subjects ranging from a coast-to-coast journey across the United States in the 1950s to a celebrated “biography” of Venice that remains one of the most-read books about that storied city . Among Morris’s most notable achievements was the three-volume Pax Britannica , which chronicled the history of the British empire from the earliest days of the East India Company to the disruptive post-colonial years of the 1960s. In 1968, The Times Literary Supplement described Pax Britannica as “a tour de force, offering a vast amount of information and description, with a style full of sensuality.” And in the The New York Times Book Review , the British biographer Philip Magnus called it “a successful portrayal of what the Empire looked and felt like in a variety of places at the end of the 19th Century — how it ticked, who pulled the strings, and the practical ends and ideals it served.”

Morris wrote the first two volumes as James and the last as Jan. In 1997, she was asked by an interviewer for The Paris Review whether the change of genders altered in any way her perspective on history.

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“I truly don’t think at all, really,” she responded . “I’ve reread the books myself with this in mind. I don’t think there is a great deal of difference. It was a purely intellectual or aesthetic, artistic approach to a fairly remote subject. It wasn’t anything, I don’t think, that could be affected much by my own personal affairs . . . less than other things I’ve written.”  

Another two dozen books came after Morris’s transition. Besides Conundrum , originally published in 1974, they included Destinations (1980), a collection of travel essays; the novel Last Letters From Hav (1985), which was a finalist for the Booker Prize; and Fisher’s Face, or, Getting to Know the Admiral (1995), a biography of the British naval reformer John Arbuthnot Fisher. Her last book, a collection of essays titled Thinking Again , was published in 2019 .

Before all that was Hillary’s headline-making ascent of Mt. Everest when Morris was a young correspondent for The Times of London . It is hard to overstate the impact Hillary’s conquest—and thus Morris’s journalistic scoop—had on the newspaper-reading world back in 1953. The Times had secured the exclusive rights to cover the Everest expedition, which was led by Sir Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand explorer , and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa guide from Nepal, and picked Morris to cover that journey. As The New York Times later wrote, “Filing dispatches by using guides as relays between the expedition’s overnight camps and the city of Kathmandu in Nepal, [Morris] wrote of deep snow dragging at the explorers’ feet, sweat trickling down their backs, their faces burning from cold, ice and wind.” Morris would later describe the event as one of the high points of her career. “I think for sheer exuberance the best day of my life was my last on Everest,” she wrote in Conundrum . “The mountain had been climbed, and I had already begun my race down the glacier toward Katmandu, leaving the expedition to pack its gear behind me.”

Jan Morris was born James Humphrey Morris on October 2, 1926, in Somerset, England, the youngest of three to an English mother, Enid, a church organist, and a Welsh father, Walter, an engineer and World War I veteran who died when Morris was 12. Morris started her career in journalism at the age of 16, working as a reporter for the Western Daily Press in Bristol.

At 22, while living in Cairo, where she was working for the local Arab News Agency, Morris met and married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the British daughter of a tea planter. The couple raised four children (a fifth died in infancy) and stayed together—first as spouses, then as ex-spouses, and finally as domestic partners—for nearly 70 years. (Tuckniss survives her.)

In 1964, Morris, whose fame as a journalist had continued to grow through her coverage of such events as the trials of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal , and the American spy Francis Gary Power , started taking hormone pills to begin her transition at the advice of a doctor she met in New York . Then, in 1972, at the age of 46, Morris traveled to Casablanca and underwent gender-reassignment surgery. Conundrum , which chronicles those events, was her first book published under the name Jan Morris. As she wrote of the surgery, “I had reached Identity.” 

The opening lines of Conundrum soon became among the most famous of any 20th-century memoir: “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.”

Morris was not the first to make headlines for her transition— Christine Jorgensen came 20 years before her—but she was probably the person who possessed the most pre-transition fame until Caitlyn Jenner covered Vanity Fair in 2015 .

The impact of Conundrum was immediate, and it continues to draw raves from later generations of readers. As the author Jonathan Ames noted recently , “This is a beautiful book. I found it to be melancholic, courageous, and wise. That its subject matter is Jan Morris’s transsexual journey almost seems secondary to her incredible prose and the clarity of her honesty and introspection. Beyond the issue of gender, she searches for an answer to that most elusive of questions: who am I?” (Though most of the book’s initial reviews were laudatory, not everyone was a fan. Reviewing Conundrum for The New York Times Book Review , Rebecca West gave it grudging respect while seeming to wonder why Morris felt the need to change genders, much less make it the subject of her book . For good measure, West sniped, “She sounds not like a woman, but like a man’s idea of a women, and curiously enough, the idea of a woman not nearly as intelligent as James Morris used to be.”)

Despite the enhanced celebrity her transition brought her, Morris maintained that her day-to-day life was little changed. As she wrote in Conundrum , her longtime Welsh neighbors seemed unfazed by the new person in their midst:“The Welsh are kind to most people and especially kind to their own.”

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Besides her many books and essays, Morris also wrote elegant travel pieces for Vogue , on such varied subjects as Crete, the Napa Valley, Trieste, and her adopted homeland of Wales. Her editor at Vogue , Richard Alleman, recalled this weekend the pleasurable experience of working with Morris. “She was a breeze to work with–editing her meant adding or deleting a comma here and there and nothing else because she was such a fine writer,” Alleman said. “She was incredibly polite and kind and appreciative of the editor’s work, even if we had done practically nothing.”

In that Paris Review article, Morris was asked if she was initially drawn to travel as a kind of metaphorical escape from the life she then lived as a man. “Well, I used to think it hadn’t anything to do with escape because I’ve always enjoyed traveling; it’s one of my great pleasures,” Morris answered. “My original travels were not quite voluntary. I went abroad with the British army, and there wasn’t much sense of escape in that. But later I did begin to believe that maybe there was some sort of allegorical meaning to my traveling. I thought that the restlessness I was possessed by was, perhaps, some yearning, not so much for the sake of escape as for the sake of quest: a quest for unity, a search for wholeness. I certainly didn’t think of it that way in the beginning, but I’ve come to think it might be so.”  

Though a trailblazer, Morris was not one to dwell too deeply on the significant role she played in the history of LGBTQ rights.

As The New York Times noted in 2019, when her last book of essays, In My Mind’s Eye , was serialized on BBC Radio , giving her another jolt of late-in-life fame, Morris had always been impatient with reporters’ questions about transgender politics, “possibly because she made peace with her own decisions so long ago.” As she told the paper of her transition , “I’ve never believed it to be quite as important as everyone made it out to be…I believe in the soul and the spirit more than the body.”

She made a similar point in Conundrum, writing, “To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music, it is a spring in one’s stem or an exchange of glances, it is more truly life and love than any combination of genitals, ovaries and hormones.”

In one of her last interviews, conducted in March of this year, Morris talked of her advanced age and the realization that her life was nearing its close. “I am sorry to be so indistinct,” she told a reporter for The Guardian , when briefly losing her train of thought while recounting an anecdote. “The truth is, you are talking to someone at the very end of things. I felt that first about two years ago. I felt it creeping up, and now I know I am approaching the end.” 

And while she might not have meant it to be, the final passage in her 2001 book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, could well serve as an epitaph. “As for me, when my clock moves on for the last time, the angel having returned to Heaven, the angler having packed it in for the night and gone to the pub, I shall happily haunt the two places that have most happily haunted me,” Morris wrote. “Most of the after-time I shall be wandering with my beloved along the banks of the Dwyfor; but now and then you may find me in a boat below the walls of Miramar, watching the nightingales swarm.”

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Jan Morris, historian, travel writer and trans pioneer, dies aged 94

From her Everest scoop to her journey as a trans woman, the author’s authoritative voice and questioning mind found an eager audience

• Obituary: Jan Morris

Jan Morris, the historian and travel writer who evoked time and place with the flair of a novelist, has died aged 94.

As a journalist Morris broke monumental news, including Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s ascent of Everest , and the French involvement in the Israeli attack on Egypt in the Suez war . As a bestselling author of more than 30 books, she was equally lauded for histories including Pax Britannica, her monumental account of the British Empire, and for her colourful accounts of places from Venice to Oxford, Hong Kong to Trieste. But she was also well-known as a transgender pioneer, with Conundrum, her account of the journey from man to woman, an international sensation when it was published in 1974.

Her son, Twm, announced her death on Friday. “This morning at 11.40 at Ysbyty Bryn Beryl, on the Llyn, the author and traveller Jan Morris began her greatest journey. She leaves behind on the shore her lifelong partner, Elizabeth,” he wrote.

Born James Morris in Somerset in 1926, Morris traced the roots of her transition back to childhood. In Conundrum, she recalled realising, aged three or four, that “I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl”. At first she “cherished it as a secret”, the “conviction of mistaken sex … no more than a blur, tucked away at the back of my mind”. But all through her childhood she felt “a yearning for I knew not what, as though there were a piece missing from my pattern, or some element in me that should be hard and permanent, but was instead soluble and diffuse.”

Morris joined the army in 1943, and served as an intelligence officer in Palestine before returning to study English at Oxford and working as a journalist. When the Times sent her on the 1953 expedition to climb Everest, Morris preserved the scoop by racing down the mountain and wiring a coded message: “Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.” The story appeared on the morning Elizabeth II was crowned.

The star correspondent spent the next year travelling from New York to Los Angeles, a journey at the heart of Morris’s first book, Coast to Coast, in 1956. The Guardian called it “admirably evocative”, at its best “where he has drunk deeply of American life”.

A disagreement with the Times over its stance on Anthony Eden’s adventure in Suez saw Morris join the Guardian, heading for Egypt when Israel launched an invasion. Returning through the Sinai desert with Israeli forces, Morris noticed Egyptian lorries and tanks that had been completely incinerated. When she fell into conversation with some French fighter pilots based at an airport outside Tel Aviv, she discovered they had been supporting the Israeli campaign with napalm bombs. The report was the first evidence of French collusion in the Suez conflict , lifting the lid on a plan that forced Eden to resign and left Britain humiliated.

For the next five years Morris alternated six months at the Guardian and six months writing books on South Africa and the Middle East. The publication of her cultural history, Venice, in 1960 allowed her to move towards writing full-time. Writing in the Observer, Harold Nicolson called it “a highly intelligent portrait of an eccentric city”, which “gives us all the sadness and the beauty of a civilisation that has decayed”.

“He is never soppy or sentimental,” Nicolson continued, “a brisk bora or a clean Adriatic breeze always comes to shift the fog and to stir the paludian exhalations; his is a very virile book.”

Nicolson can hardly have known that while in Venice, Morris had begun to take hormone pills, the first steps of a transition which was completed in 1972 by a surgeon in Casablanca. “I should have been terrified, but I wasn’t,” she told the New York Times in 1974. “It was inevitable – I’d been heading there mentally all my life.”

Critics on both sides of the Atlantic struggled with her account of the transformation, Conundrum. In the Guardian, AN Wilson confessed himself unsure as to why it is easy “to let a little bitchiness creep into one’s comments on Miss Morris’s most interesting book”, while in the New York Times, Rebecca West admitted that “now we are both women he mystifies me”. Noting acerbically that, as a man, “he had all the pleasures he wanted”, West questioned the validity of Morris’s identity: “She sounds not like a woman, but like a man’s idea of a woman, and curiously enough, the idea of a man not nearly so intelligent as James Morris used to be … I cannot accept Conundrum as the story of a true change of sex.” But in her own life, Morris reported little change: walking in her town, no one batted an eyelid when she introduced herself as Jan. “I put it down to kindness,” she told the Observer in 2020 . “Just that. Everything good in the world is kindness.”

While critics floundered, the book became a bestseller around the world and Morris’s literary reputation continued to grow. Her three-volume history of the British Empire, Pax Britannica, was completed in 1978, while in 1985 her novel, Last Letters from Hav, was shortlisted for the Booker prize. Volumes evoking Hong Kong, Sydney and Trieste spanned the globe, but she always rejected the term “travel writer”, explaining to the Guardian in 2015 that while she had only written one book about a journey across the Oman desert, she wrote “many books about place, which are nothing to do with movement, but many more about people and about history”.

Reflecting on her own history in 2018, Morris said her transition no longer felt like the defining moment of her life, telling the Financial Times that it hadn’t changed her writing “in the slightest. It changed me far less than I thought it had.” As she approached her final years she thought of herself as “both man and woman … or a mixture of both.” Her transition may have overshadowed her books at first, she admitted, “but it’s faded now.”

Morris remained with her wife, Elizabeth, after her transition, though they had to divorce. They held a civil union ceremony in Pwllheli in 2008.

Her final book, Think Again , a collection of her diaries, was published in March.

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Jan Morris, Celebrated Writer of Place and History, Is Dead at 94

In more than four dozen books, Morris explored foreign lands, her own Britain and her experience as a transgender woman.

By Jonathan Kandell

Jan Morris, the acclaimed British journalist, travel writer and historian who wrote about history’s sweep and the details of place with equal eloquence and chronicled her life as a transgender woman, died on Friday in Wales. She was 94.

Her son Twm Morys said in an email that she died in a hospital near the village of Llanystumdwy, where she lived. He did not give the cause.

As James Morris she was a military officer in one of Britain’s most renowned cavalry regiments and then a daring journalist who climbed three-quarters of the way up Mount Everest for an exclusive series of dispatches from the first conquest of that mountain, the world’s highest.

She continued a brilliant writing career with reports on wars and revolutions from a score of countries, and with much-admired books like “Pax Britannica,” the first of a three-volume history of the British Empire. Ms. Morris also married and had five children.

But she became increasingly despondent over the issue of gender identity. At age 46, she underwent transition surgery, explaining the reasoning in a well-received 1974 memoir, “Conundrum,” which was written two years after the operation under a new byline, Jan Morris.

“I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl,” the book began, a riveting narrative of being transgender, which was misunderstood at the time and rarely discussed.

“I thought of public success itself, I suppose, as part of maleness, and I deliberately turned my back on it, as I set my face against manhood,” she wrote.

In all, Ms. Morris wrote some four dozen books. Among the best-known early titles were “The Hashemite Kings” (1959) and “Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress” (1973).

In a 1957 review of “Islam Inflamed: A Middle East Picture,” Phoebe-Lou Adams of The Atlantic wrote that Ms. Morris’s “descriptions of cities and countrysides are equally vivid” and that her writing conveyed “the emotional tone of a place as sharply as its shape and color.”

“Venice” (1960) won Britain’s prestigious Heinemann Award for Literature. In The New York Times Book Review , the Italian author Carlo Beuf called the book “one of the most satisfactory and delightful works on the City of the Lagoons to appear in recent years.”

In 1968, The Times Literary Supplement in London hailed “Pax Britannica” as “a tour de force, offering a vast amount of information and description, with a style full of sensuality.” And in The New York Times Book Review , the British biographer Philip Magnus called it “a successful portrayal of what the Empire looked and felt like in a variety of places at the end of the 19th Century — how it ticked, who pulled the strings, and the practical ends and ideals it served.”

Another two dozen books came after Ms. Morris’s transition. Besides “Conundrum,” they included “Destinations” (1980), a collection of travel essays; “Last Letters From Hav” (1985), a deadpan exploration of an imaginary city that was a finalist for the Booker Prize; and “Fisher’s Face, or, Getting to Know the Admiral” (1995), a biography of the British naval reformer John Arbuthnot Fisher.

Ms. Morris excelled as a travel writer, drawing literary portraits of places like Manhattan, Hong Kong, her beloved Wales (she was a dedicated Welsh nationalist), Oxford in England and Trieste in Italy.

In a 1984 Times review of “Journeys,” a collection of articles written mostly in the 1980s, Anatole Broyard extolled Ms. Morris’s travel books as “oddly reassuring, showing us that there are more ways of experiencing cultures than most of us supposed.” He took note of her insights, citing her descriptions of Las Vegas (“the acrid smell of fun”), the booming Scottish oil town of Aberdeen (“the brio of capitalism in the raw”) and the English cathedral town of Wells (where “the cathedral’s chief function was its own repair”).

Ms. Morris continued writing into her later years, including the essayistic “In My Mind’s Eye: A Thought Diary,” published in 2018. A final work, “Allegorizings,” is to be published posthumously. She told The Guardian in 2015 that it would go to press “the minute I kick the bucket,” saying the book is “loosely governed by my growing conviction that almost nothing in life is only what it seems. It contains nothing revelatory at all.”

Ms. Morris was born on Oct. 2, 1926, in Clevedon, a town in Somerset, England. Her father, Walter, was gassed during World War I and died when Ms. Morris was 12. Her mother, Enid Payne, was a concert pianist.

Ms. Morris enlisted in the elite Ninth Queen’s Royal Lancers in 1944 and served in Italy during World War II as an intelligence officer. After two more years of military service in Palestine, then a British protectorate, she was discharged as an army lieutenant and enrolled at Oxford University, receiving a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1951.

Ms. Morris joined The Times of London that same year, becoming a roving correspondent in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. But it was her coverage of the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 that established a reputation as one of the shining journalists of a generation.

The Times secured the exclusive rights to cover the Everest expedition, which was led by Col. John Hunt ( Sir Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand explorer, and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa guide from Nepal, were the climbers who reached the summit), and picked Ms. Morris — 5-foot-9 and a sinewy 140 pounds — to join the team.

Filing dispatches by using guides as relays between the expedition’s overnight camps and the city of Kathmandu in Nepal, she wrote of deep snow dragging at the explorers’ feet, sweat trickling down their backs, their faces burning from cold, ice and wind. But Ms. Morris stopped short of the summit, allowing the expedition leaders to claim the limelight.

“I think for sheer exuberance the best day of my life was my last on Everest,” she wrote in “Conundrum.” “The mountain had been climbed, and I had already begun my race down the glacier toward Katmandu, leaving the expedition to pack its gear behind me.”

She continued: “I heard from the radio that my news had reached London providentially on the eve of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. I felt as though I had been crowned myself.” For a Britain that was fast losing its empire, the conquest of Everest was greeted with nationalistic euphoria.

As a correspondent with The Times and later with The Guardian, Ms. Morris wrote about wars, famines and earthquakes and reported on the trial in Israel of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal who was convicted and executed for his leading role in the extermination of millions of Jews.

She also covered the trial in Moscow of Francis Gary Powers, the United States spy plane pilot who was shot down over the Soviet Union. She traveled to Havana to interview Che Guevara, the revolutionary leader, who was described in “Conundrum” as “sharp as a cat,” and to Moscow again to meet with the British intelligence defector Guy Burgess, who was “swollen with drink and self-reproach.”

It was in the early 1960s that Ms. Morris met with a prominent New York endocrinologist, Dr. Harry Benjamin, an early researcher on transgender people.

He advised her on a slow process of transition that began with heavy doses of female hormones — some 12,000 pills from 1964 to 1972, according to the writer’s own calculations. Ms. Morris wrote, “I was about to change my form and apparency — my status, too, perhaps my place among my peers, my attitudes no doubt, the reactions I would evoke, my reputation, my manner of life, my prospects, my emotions, possibly my abilities.”

From the very beginning of her marriage, Ms. Morris had confided her feelings about her gender identity to her wife, Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter.

“I told her that though each year my every instinct seemed to become more feminine and my entombment within the male physique more terrible to me, still the mechanism of my body was complete and functional, and for what it is worth was hers,” Ms. Morris wrote.

They would have three sons and two daughters, one of whom died in infancy. In addition to her son Twm, a Welsh poet and musician, she is survived by Ms. Tuckniss; two other sons, Mark and Henry; a daughter, Suki; and nine grandchildren.

“Conundrum” describes Ms. Morris’s relationship with Ms. Tuckniss, even before the surgery, as an “open marriage, in which the partners were explicitly free to lead their own separate lives, choose their own friends if they wish, have their own lovers perhaps, restrained only by an agreement of superior affection and common concern.”

Ms. Tuckniss and later their children, with some discomfort, supported Ms. Morris’s initial hormone treatments.

She finally decided on an operation to complete her transition in 1972, choosing a clinic in Casablanca, Morocco.

Ms. Morris asserted that every aspect of existence changed with her transition. The more she was treated as a woman, the more she behaved — in her own estimation — as a woman.

“If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming,” she wrote. “If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.” She added, “I discovered that even now men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative, and certainly less self-centered than they are themselves; so I generally obliged them.”

Reaction to her transition, and her chronicling of it, included shock and disparagement, and gave rise to critical debate about the nature of her writing voice and how she depicted what it means to be a woman. Female writers were troubled by Ms. Morris’s value judgments on the differences between the sexes, which were especially controversial in an era when the feminist movement was reaching its apogee.

“She sounds not like a woman, but like a man’s idea of a woman, and curiously enough, the idea of a man not nearly so intelligent as James Morris used to be,” Rebecca West wrote in a 1974 appraisal of “Conundrum” in The Times Book Review.

But Bernard Levin, writing in The London Observer that same year, noted that “as a communication of the uncommunicable, ‘Conundrum’ is very good indeed.” It is also, he said, “in many ways, a straightforward autobiography rippling with humor.”

And Auberon Waugh, the British columnist and critic, asserted in a 1976 article in The Times Book Review on “Travels,” a collection of essays by Morris, that “she now writes in a fine, robust, self-confident style.”

Ms. Morris herself asserted that her transition had changed her view of life so profoundly that it was bound to affect her writing style.

“My scale of vision seemed to contract, and I looked less for the grand sweep than for the telling detail,” she wrote in “Conundrum.” “The emphasis changed in my writing, from places to people.”

She complained that her transition had distracted from her writing accomplishments. “I do object to it being dragged in, for example, when I write a book about the British Empire,” she said on “CBS Sunday Morning” in 2000. Nonetheless, she repeated on the program her prediction that the headlines on her obituaries would read: “Sex-change author dies.”

By her early 90s, Ms. Morris said the matter seemed remote.

“I’ve never believed it to be quite as important as everyone made it out to be,” she told The Times in 2019. “I believe in the soul and the spirit more than the body.”

Although she divorced her wife just before her operation, the two remained close, often traveling and living together, even after Ms. Tuckniss began struggling with dementia. In their house, Ms. Morris kept a gravestone that bore the inscription — both in Welsh and English — that was meant to be their future epitaph: “Here are two friends, Jan and Elizabeth, at the end of one life.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

An earlier version of this obituary misidentified the leader of the first ascent of Mount Everest, which Ms. Morris covered for The Times of London in 1953. The expedition was led by Col. John Hunt — not by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the climbers who reached the summit.

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Appreciation: My lunch with Jan Morris, writer, traveler, transgender pioneer

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Jan Morris, as witty, learned and enthusiastic a traveler as ever there was, died Friday , at least 24 years after selecting her tombstone.

She was 94, a devoted resident of Wales (where she died), a celebrated historian, journalist and transgender pioneer.

As obituaries around the world will note, she unlocked secrets of Venice and Trieste, Italy; Oxford, England; Spain; Hong Kong; Manhattan; Mt. Everest; and scores of other locations in dozens of volumes of history and travel.

Morris also served as an essayist for Rolling Stone magazine, wrote a trilogy on the rise of the British Empire and devoted an entire volume to a Mediterranean destination, Hav, that was eerily compelling and entirely imaginary.

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“Jan was just so self-contained. She loved places and she loved people. But I don’t think she needed to have company to enjoy herself,” said Michael Shapiro, a Bay Area writer who interviewed Morris several times and included her in his 2004 book, “A Sense of Place.”

Added Shapiro: “Jan believed in everybody charting their own course. She certainly did. What a magnificent, indomitable life.”

By the time my wife, Mary Frances, and I met her in 1996, she looked and behaved like your favorite aunt. She was, as I wrote, a tall, white-haired woman, 69 years old, robust, quick with a quip and inclined to tear across the countryside at high speeds in her Honda Prelude.

“I find this landscape unmatchably beautiful,” she told us. “The scale of it! And how it changes every half-hour. I’m always comparing places to it.”

We’d come because I was writing a magazine story about Wales. When I wrote ahead to ask for a few moments of her time, she invited my wife and me to lunch at Portmeirion.

We were charmed, of course. Supreme self-confidence. No pretense. And the career of Jan Morris, we knew, was the second act in the writer’s story.

Morris was born James Morris, son of a Welsh father and English mother, studied at Oxford, served in the British Army and became a star reporter at the Times of London, a tenure that included a global scoop on Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s 1953 conquest of Mt. Everest. To get that scoop, Morris followed the great climber 20,000 feet up and sent a key message in code to keep the news exclusive.

Yet through all of those years, including marriage and fatherhood, Morris knew something was not quite right. As she later wrote:

“I was perhaps three or four years old when I realized I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.”

Those words come from “ Conundrum,” the author’s 1974 account of the journey from manhood to transgender womanhood. That voyage included hormone treatment and an experimental operation in North Africa at a time when the term “transgender” was rarely heard.

From then on, through several more memoirs and many books of history and travel, the author was Jan, not James. And the words were sharp as diamonds.

Here she is on Las Vegas in the 1980s: “Las Vegas sometimes reminds me of the terrible little towns of inner Sicily or Sardinia, where half of the population consists of murderers, kidnappers or extortionists, and the other half pretends not to notice.”

On La Paz, Bolivia: “It is a tumultuous, feverish, often-maddening, generally harum-scarum kind of place, but nobody with an eye to country or a taste for drama could fail to respond to its excitements, or resist the superb improbability of its situation.”

And there’s this on Trieste: “There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones. They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to believe that its natural capital is Trieste.”

After our lunch at Portmeirion, Morris asked us to join her at the 18th century farmhouse she shared with her partner (previously her wife), Elizabeth, who survives her.

There, Morris told us that her father was Welsh, her mother English; but she’d always identified with the Welsh half. In fact, she confessed, in the early 1990s, in a ceremony rich with flowing robes and Druid overtones, Morris had been installed as a bard of the Gorsedd, the most prominent cultural organization in Wales.

Over tea, Jan and Elizabeth talked about the adventures of their grown children, the kite-flying of a grandchild, the resurgence of the Welsh language.

“All these things are happening,” Morris said. “And all these people who speak only English have no idea they’re happening.”

I think one of us said that for somebody in the business of going away, she seemed partial to home.

Always a believer in bold gestures, Jan couldn’t resist telling us about the gravestone she’d already had chiseled for them. They kept it beneath the stairs.

Atop her roof, meanwhile, Morris had placed a custom-made weather vane: Two of its compass points were labeled with characters from the English alphabet, two from the Welsh.

Continuing the tour, she led us along a path beneath oak, ash and sycamore trees, then paused for dramatic effect.

“Down here,” she announced with a wave of her arm, “is my grave. On a small island in the stream.”

May the island endure and the stream run.

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Jan Morris, Groundbreaking Trans Writer, Captures Humanity in Her Work

The legendary travel writer's books have secured a place in history, which is why she's one of The Advocate 's Women of the Year. 

Jan Morris is one of The Advocate ' Women of the Year. View the full list from the current issue of the magazine.

Ninety-three-year-old transgender author, historian, and travel writer Jan Morris has published numerous books in her storied career. Perhaps she's best known for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire that took 10 years to complete.

However, the Welsh-born traveler is also famous for being the reporter embedded with mountaineers Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay as they became the first to summit Mount Everest -- news that coincidentally was released on the morning of Queen Elizabeth's coronation. Morris's work is acclaimed for blending history and psychological examination with her imaginative descriptions about the world's most treasured cities.

Morris, a former soldier and British spy, began transitioning in 1964. In one of her many books, 1974's Conundrum, she describes returning to her home in Wales and going into a local shop for the first time as Jan. Much to her surprise, no one bats an eyelash.

"I put it down to kindness. Just that. Everything good in the world is kindness," she told The Guardian as she relived that moment. "If you are not sure what you think about something, the most useful questions are these: Are you being kind? Are they being kind? That usually gives you the answer."

More than 70 years ago, Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss. British law forced the couple to divorce following Morris's transition, but their relationship endured. They remain a couple to this day. At her age, Morris may not be with us another decade, but this nonagenarian deserves to be talked about for generations to come.

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British travel writer and transgender pioneer Jan Morris dies aged 94

LONDON (THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION) - British travel writer and transgender pioneer Jan Morris, who as a journalist broke the 1953 news of Edmund Hillary's conquest of Everest, has died at the age of 94.

"This morning at 11.40 at Ysbyty Bryn Beryl, on the Llyn, the author and traveller Jan Morris began her greatest journey. She leaves behind on the shore her life-long partner, Elizabeth," her son Twm Morys said in a statement on Friday (Nov 20).

Morris, who first published under the name James, switched to Jan after undergoing gender reassignment in 1972 and was the author of more than three dozen books.

She ranked highly among travel writers, with Publishers Weekly once calling her "one of the most admired and imitated travel writers alive".

Her books include Manhattan '45, about New York in 1945; Venice; the Pax Britannica trilogy, about the decline of the British Empire; and Conundrum, about her transition.

Teacher and trans campaigner Debbie Hayton said Morris' 1974 memoir had been revelatory, coming at a time when the only mention of trans people in the media was salacious headlines.

"Wind the clock back 30 years ago and all we had was Jan Morris' book," Ms Hayton told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "It was such a pioneering book that told her story when there were few other stories like these being told."

A book of essays, Allegorizings, musings on ageing and the complexity of life, will be published posthumously.

'Proud of my books'

In a BBC Artsnight interview with writer and broadcaster Michael Palin, himself a renowned traveller, Morris said her life had been "one self-centred exercise in self-satisfaction".

"I've enjoyed this life very much and I admire it," she said. "I think it's been a very good and interesting life and I've made a whole of it quite deliberately."

Born in Somerset, England, in 1926, Morris and her partner, Elizabeth, had five children - including the Welsh poet and musician Twm Morys. They had remained together since their 1949 marriage and lived in North Wales.

In a 2008 interview with Reuters, she said she had been "personally concerned with my own death for ages".

"About 30 years ago, I had our gravestone cut," Morris said.

"It's under the stairs at home; it has been there ever since. It's got my own epitaph, which is 'Here are two friends - Jan and Elizabeth Morris - at the end of one life.'"

Morris told Reuters that she was "proud of her books", saying her favourite was Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere, which detailed her love affair with the Italian city she first visited as a soldier at the close of World War II.

She spent much of her life in Wales, writing initially for British newspapers before embarking on a career as a travel writer. In 2018, the Financial Times called Morris "perhaps the best-travelled Briton alive".

The recipient of many awards over her long career, she was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in 1999.

Tributes flooded her social media on Friday.

Best-selling author Kate Mosse tweeted that Morris had been "an extraordinary woman".

"Her beautiful writing touched so many of my worlds. A very special and lovely human being," tweeted Mr Paul Jenkins, chief executive of The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, Britain's leading gender identity clinic.

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Jan Morris dead: Travel writer, historian and transgender pioneer dies aged 94

Jan Morris, who as a journalist was best known for breaking the 1953 news of Edmund Hillary's conquest of Everest, was once called "one of the most admired and imitated travel writers alive"

• 19:22, 20 Nov 2020
• Updated 19:32, 20 Nov 2020

British travel writer and transgender pioneer Jan Morris has died at the age of 94.

As a journalist she was best known for breaking the 1953 news of Edmund Hillary's conquest of Everest.

Morris, who first published under the name James, switched to Jan after undergoing gender reassignment in 1972 and was the author of more than three dozen books.

She ranked highly among travel writers, with Publishers Weekly once calling her "one of the most admired and imitated travel writers alive".

"This morning at 11.40 at Ysbyty Bryn Beryl, on the Llyn, the author and traveller Jan Morris began her greatest journey," her son Twm Morys said in a statement today.

"She leaves behind on the shore her life-long partner, Elizabeth,"

Morris's books include "Manhattan '45," about New York in 1945, "Venice", the "Pax Britannica" trilogy about the decline of the British Empire, and "Conundrum" about her transition.

Teacher and trans campaigner Debbie Hayton said Morris's 1974 memoir had been revelatory, coming at a time when the only mention of trans people in the media was salacious headlines.

"Wind the clock back 30 years ago and all we had was Jan Morris's book," Hayton said.

"It was such a pioneering book that told her story when there were few other stories like these being told."

A book of essays, "Allegorizings", musings on ageing and the complexity of life, will be published posthumously.

In a BBC "Artsnight" interview with writer and broadcaster Michael Palin, himself a renowned traveller, Morris said her life had been "one self-centred exercise in self-satisfaction".

"I've enjoyed this life very much and I admire it," she said.

"I think it's been a very good and interesting life and I've made a whole of it quite deliberately."

Born in Somerset, England, in 1926, Morris and her partner Elizabeth had five children - including the Welsh poet and musician Twm Morys.

They had remained together since their 1949 marriage and lived in North Wales.

In a 2008 interview with Reuters, she said she had been "personally concerned with my own death for ages".

"About 30 years ago I had our gravestone cut," Morris said.

"It's under the stairs at home, it has been there ever since.

"It's got my own epitaph, which is 'Here are two friends - Jan and Elizabeth Morris - at the end of one life.'"

Morris said she was "proud of her books", saying her favourite was "Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere", which detailed her love affair with the Italian city she first visited as a soldier at the close of the second world war.

She spent much of her life in Wales, writing initially for British newspapers before embarking on a career as a travel writer.

In 2018, the Financial Times called Morris "perhaps the best-travelled Briton alive".

The recipient of many awards over her long career, she was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in 1999.

Tributes to her flooded social media on Friday.

Best-selling author Kate Mosse tweeted that Morris had been "an extraordinary woman".

"Her beautiful writing touched so many of my worlds. A very special and lovely human being," tweeted Paul Jenkins, chief executive of The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, Britain's leading gender identity clinic.

MORE ON Twm Morys Kate Mosse Paul Jenkins Michael Palin Transgender Tributes Transgender community

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UK: LGBTQ+ Trailblazers: British Journalist, Travel Writer And Transgender Pioneer Jan Morris

From Everest to Conundrum: the indomitable life of journalist, travel writer and transgender pioneer Jan Morris

A trailblazing journalist and travel writer, Jan Morris's life intersected numerous significant junctures of the 20th Century. In 1953, Jan scaled to fame with the team that successfully conquered Sagarmatha (aka Mount Everest).

The rest of the 1950s she travelled the world as a journalist, interviewing key figures such as Che Guevara ("sharp as a cat in Cuba") or Guy Burgess ("swollen with drink and self-reproach in Moscow"), and reporting from Israel, Algeria, South Africa, Hong Kong and Japan for the BBC. In the decade that followed, she turned her focus to travel writing, authoring books about cities and countries, before undergoing gender reassignment in 1972, chronicling her transition in her seminal 1974 autobiography Conundrum.

Born 2 October 1926 in Somerset, England, Jan married Elizabeth in 1949 and the couple lived together until Jan passed away November 2020 aged 94. At the end of WWII, Jan was posted to the Free Territory of Trieste, eventually serving as an intelligence officer. In 1951, Jan returned to Oxford, receiving a BA, whilst editing the Cherwell magazine.

"I never did think that my own conundrum was a matter either of science or of social convention. I thought it was a matter of the spirit, a kind of divine allegory, and that explanations of it were not very important anyway. What was important was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels. – Conundrum"

Writing for The Times after WWII, Jan accompanied Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary's 1953 first (Western) Mount Everest ascent. Worried other newspapers might steal her story (one of the great journalistic scoops of the 20th Century) Jan perilously scrambled down Everest to deliver her coded despatch that made news of success of the expedition appear to be news of failure:  "Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement".

In 1964, Jan began her transition to life as a woman as one of the first high-profile individuals to do so. In 1972, she was forced to travel to Morocco to undergo sex reassignment surgery because British doctors refused to allow the procedure unless Jan and Elizabeth divorced, which they refused to do. However, they later divorced, remaining together until becoming civil partners in 2008. After transitioning, she went on to author more than three dozen books.

A leading reporter and author of her time

In 1956, Jan's reporting from Cyprus on the Suez Crisis for the Manchester Guardian produced the first "irrefutable proof" of collusion between Britain, France and Israel in the invasion of Egypt. Winning a George Polk Award for journalism in 1960, Jan reported on the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of unrepentant Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann.

Jan authored numerous books on travel particularly to Manhattan, Venice and Trieste. Jan's Pax Britannica trilogy on the decline of the British Empire and one of the few histories to tackle Britain's brutal colonial past received much praise. Her 1985 novel Last Letters from Hav, an "imagined travelogue and political thriller" was shortlisted for that year's Booker Prize.

"I spent half my life traveling in foreign places. I did it because I liked it, and to earn a living, and I have only lately come to see that incessant wandering as an outer expression of my inner journey. I have never doubted, though, that much of the emotional force, what the Welsh call hwyl, that men spend in sex, I sublimated in travel—perhaps even in movement itself, for I have always loved speed, wind, and great spaces [. . .] But it could not work forever [. . .] My manhood was meaningless. ? Conundrum"

A fellow of Christ Church, Oxford and the Royal Society of Literature, Jan received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Wales and Glamorgan. In 1992, Jan was elected to Gorsedd Cymru – a society of Welsh-language artists. In 1996, she received the Glyndwr Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts in Wales. A Welsh nationalist republican at heart, Jan accepted her CBE in 1999 "out of polite respect". In 2005, Jan was awarded the English Golden PEN Award. The Times named her the 15th greatest British writer since the War in 2008. She won the 2018 Edward Stanford Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing Award.

Jan documented her transition in Conundrum, an international bestseller in 1974 and one of the first autobiographies to discuss a personal gender reassignment. Describing the process that led Jan to a clinic in Casablanca and her adjustment to life as a woman, it generated enormous interest around the world, featuring on The Times' "100 Key Books of Our Time" and the New York Times' "50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years":

A pioneering story of transitioning

"It is a powerful and beautifully written document, from which Jan and her lifelong partner Elizabeth emerge as heroines of a sort."

"It might be of its time but it is also ardent, musical, poetic and full of warm humor — a chronicle of ecstasies. Best remembered as one of the first accounts of gender transition, "Conundrum" is a study of home in all its forms — of finding home in one's body, of Morris's native Wales, of all the cities she possesses by dint of loving them so fiercely."

Jan in Conundrum described "identity" as  "a trendy word I have long distrusted, masking as it often does befuddled ideas and lazy thinking. ... To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial," "It was a melody that I heard within myself."

Drawing comparisons to transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen's book A Personal Autobiography, Conundrum was, however, also met by hostility: Nora Ephron belittled Conundrum as  "a mawkish and embarrassing book. . . . Jan Morris is perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is exactly what James Morris wanted to become those many years ago. A girl. And worse, a 47-year-old girl."  By contrast, trans campaigner Debbie Hayton affirmed Conundrum had been revelatory:  "Wind the clock back 30 years ago and all we had was Jan Morris's book. It was such a pioneering book that told her story when there were few other stories like these being told."

"Wind the clock back 30 years ago and all we had was Jan Morris's book. It was such a pioneering book that told her story when there were few other stories like these being told."

Jan epitomizes both intrepid intellect and indomitable spirit. Her creative and prolific writing served a higher cultural and invaluable social purpose.

Wind the clock back 30 years ago and all we had was Jan Morris's book. It was such a pioneering book that told her story when there were few other stories like these being told.

More on Jan Morris: Jan Morris Bibliography Works by Morris UK National Archives – Jan Morris

Credits https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/02/jan-morris-life-in-motion https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/books/best-memoirs.html https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-writer-morris-trfn-idUSKBN2802FN

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UK – LGBTQ+ Trailblazers: British Journalist, Travel Writer And Transgender Pioneer Jan Morris.

June 16, 2022 by

From Everest to Conundrum: the indomitable life of journalist, travel writer and transgender pioneer Jan Morris

A trailblazing journalist and travel writer, Jan Morris’s life intersected numerous significant junctures of the 20th Century. In 1953, Jan scaled to fame with the team that successfully conquered Mount Everest.

The rest of the 1950s she travelled the world as a journalist, interviewing key figures such as Che Guevara (“sharp as a cat in Cuba”) or Guy Burgess (“swollen with drink and self-reproach in Moscow”), and reporting from Israel, Algeria, South Africa, Hong Kong and Japan for the BBC. In the decade that followed, she turned her focus to travel writing, authoring books about cities and countries, before undergoing gender reassignment in 1972, chronicling her transition in her seminal 1974 autobiography Conundrum.

Born 2 October 1926 in Somerset, England, Jan married Elizabeth in 1949 and the couple lived together until Jan passed away November 2020 aged 94. At the end of WWII, Jan was posted to the Free Territory of Trieste, eventually serving as an intelligence officer. In 1951, Jan returned to Oxford, receiving a BA, whilst editing the Cherwell magazine.

Writing for The Times after WWII, Jan accompanied Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary’s 1953 first (Western) Mount Everest ascent. Worried other newspapers might steal her story (one of the great journalistic scoops of the 20th Century) Jan perilously scrambled down Everest to deliver her coded despatch that made news of success of the expedition appear to be news of failure:  “Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement”.

In 1964, Jan began her transition to life as a woman as one of the first high-profile individuals to do so. In 1972, she was forced to travel to Morocco to undergo sex reassignment surgery because British doctors refused to allow the procedure unless Jan and Elizabeth divorced, which they refused to do. However, they later divorced, remaining together until becoming civil partners in 2008. After transitioning, she went on to author more than three dozen books.

“I never did think that my own conundrum was a matter either of science or of social convention. I thought it was a matter of the spirit, a kind of divine allegory, and that explanations of it were not very important anyway. What was important was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels. – Conundrum “

A leading reporter and author of her time

In 1956, Jan’s reporting from Cyprus on the Suez Crisis for the Manchester Guardian produced the first “irrefutable proof” of collusion between Britain, France and Israel in the invasion of Egypt. Winning a George Polk Award for journalism in 1960, Jan reported on the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of unrepentant Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann.

“ I spent half my life traveling in foreign places. I did it because I liked it, and to earn a living, and I have only lately come to see that incessant wandering as an outer expression of my inner journey. I have never doubted, though, that much of the emotional force, what the Welsh call hwyl, that men spend in sex, I sublimated in travel—perhaps even in movement itself, for I have always loved speed, wind, and great spaces [. . .] But it could not work forever [. . .] My manhood was meaningless. ― Conundrum “

Jan authored numerous books on travel particularly to Manhattan, Venice and Trieste. Jan’s Pax Britannica trilogy on the decline of the British Empire and one of the few histories to tackle Britain’s brutal colonial past received much praise. Her 1985 novel Last Letters from Hav, an “imagined travelogue and political thriller” was shortlisted for that year’s Booker Prize.

A fellow of Christ Church, Oxford and the Royal Society of Literature, Jan received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Wales and Glamorgan. In 1992, Jan was elected to Gorsedd Cymru – a society of Welsh-language artists. In 1996, she received the Glyndŵr Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts in Wales. A Welsh nationalist republican at heart, Jan accepted her CBE in 1999 “out of polite respect”. In 2005, Jan was awarded the English Golden PEN Award. The Times named her the 15th greatest British writer since the War in 2008. She won the 2018 Edward Stanford Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing Award.

Jan documented her transition in Conundrum, an international bestseller in 1974 and one of the first autobiographies to discuss a personal gender reassignment. Describing the process that led Jan to a clinic in Casablanca and her adjustment to life as a woman, it generated enormous interest around the world, featuring on The Times’ “100 Key Books of Our Time” and the New York Times’ “50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years”:

A pioneering story of transitioning

“It is a powerful and beautifully written document, from which Jan and her lifelong partner Elizabeth emerge as heroines of a sort.”

“It might be of its time but it is also ardent, musical, poetic and full of warm humor — a chronicle of ecstasies. Best remembered as one of the first accounts of gender transition, “Conundrum” is a study of home in all its forms — of finding home in one’s body, of Morris’s native Wales, of all the cities she possesses by dint of loving them so fiercely.”

Jan in Conundrum described “identity” as  “a trendy word I have long distrusted, masking as it often does befuddled ideas and lazy thinking. … To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial,” “It was a melody that I heard within myself.”

Drawing comparisons to transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen’s book A Personal Autobiography, Conundrum was, however, also met by hostility: Nora Ephron belittled Conundrum as  “a mawkish and embarrassing book. . . . Jan Morris is perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is exactly what James Morris wanted to become those many years ago. A girl. And worse, a 47-year-old girl.”  By contrast, trans campaigner Debbie Hayton affirmed Conundrum had been revelatory:  “Wind the clock back 30 years ago and all we had was Jan Morris’s book. It was such a pioneering book that told her story when there were few other stories like these being told.”

Jan epitomizes both intrepid intellect and indomitable spirit. Her creative and prolific writing served a higher cultural and invaluable social purpose.

“ Wind the clock back 30 years ago and all we had was Jan Morris’s book. It was such a pioneering book that told her story when there were few other stories like these being told”.

More on Jan Morris:

Jan Morris Bibliography Works by Morris UK National Archives – Jan Morris

The Gaurdian – Jan Morris at 90: she has shown us the world The New York Times – The 50 best memoirs of the past 50 years Reuters – Travel writer and trans pioneer Jan Morris dies aged 94

For further information, please contact:

Jan Alessandrini, Withersworldwide

[email protected]

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Traveller's tale: Paul Clements on telling the story of travel writer and transgender pioneer Jan Morris

As his already acclaimed biography on travel writer jan morris is published, belfast journalist, broadcaster and author paul clements talks to jane hardy about telling the story of an extraordinary writer whose achievements included being the only reporter on the first ascent of mount everest in 1953 as well as a transgender pioneer in the late 60s.

WHEN noted British travel writer Jan (originally James) Morris anticipated her obituary, she said it would undoubtedly be headed 'Sex change writer dies', which she felt would be vulgar. As her Northern Irish biographer Paul Clements explains, things turned out better than expected: "All the headlines read 'Trans pioneer dies'."

It was, whichever way you headline it, an extraordinary life. And it is extremely well documented by Clements in Jan Morris: Life From Both Sides, published by Scribe this month.

The writing of this extremely readable 600-page book has been a labour of love.

Clements (65) knows the career of the writer who out-Palins Palin inside out. He respects the author's insistence on the feminine personal pronouns, used retrospectively. He says he first got to know Jan Morris's work as a young man when he was living in a flat in Omagh, after his widowed mother had sold her draper's shop and remarried.

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The BBC man was starting his career as a journalist on the Tyrone Constitution.

"I became interested in her in the late 70s after picking up her book Travels (1976) in a second-hand bookshop," he recalls.

"I was a journalist doing everything at the time – births, deaths, court reports."

This tome fits snugly into the Jan Morris bookcase in Clements's spacious study in his south Belfast home.

If it is a semi-shrine, it's one dedicated to great writing. Interestingly, a Lisburn man, Charles Monteith, talent spotted Morris for Faber. Clements says that he was immediately drawn to Morris's style: "We'd only done things like Dostoevsky at school and this was a friendly, personable style."

It was also, of course, quite flowery at times and Clements made an interesting discovery once he'd started the detailed research for his first book on Morris.

This was a slim volume, one of the University of Cardiff's Series on Writers from Wales. By now friends after Clements wrote Morris a fan letter, asking if she would sign his collection of her books, they nearly fell out over Clements's cheeky inclusion of a couple of the writer's early poems.

A student at the Sussex public school Lancing, James Morris had penned some high-falutin' verse for the school magazine.

Mid-career, Clements, who didn't have time to fit in a degree earlier on, won a Reuters scholarship to Oxford. This enabled him to spend a year where Jan Morris was educated.

She studied English at Christ Church, the largest and grandest of Oxford colleges. One day, Clements made a thrilling discovery in the stacks of the Bodleian Library.

"I was there every day, among the maybe million or so books they have," he tells me.

"I wasn't looking for it, but in the bowels of the building I came across the Lancing school magazine produced during the war."

Turning the pages, Clements came upon the verses by Morris. He included them in his book but when out of courtesy he showed Morris the proofs, he got a salty response. She vigorously crossed out the pages in black ink.

Yet, as Clements points out, these verses paint a picture of the time. One describes an air raid attack and contains the lines:

"Choose carefully, pilot of the fates;/Pause, consider where you drop your bombs -/Listen closely for the hypocritical hymns/While mark where, clothes in spotless coats/The enemy's foul tidiness pulsates."

An early, biased picture of the Germans as placers of neat towels on the hotel sunloungers, but relevant.

"I kept one poem, but Jan didn't bear a grudge. Although I didn't hear from her for a year, which wasn't unusual, she then wrote to me saying she'd liked the book," Clements says.

Questions of style dogged the future bestselling author who read English at college. Jan Morris studied under the noted don J.I.M. Stewart, also a thriller writer. Clements found his comments on his student's essays.

"I came across some papers, including notes on Jan's student work. He said she had a forceful style with too much affection in it which didn't serve her arguments well."

Amusingly, Stewart had, in the way of professors, marked his student down for this. Yet her writing style would make her name, career and eventually bring fame and if not fortune, a more than decent living.

Morris's Pax Britannica, about the colonial legacy, published in 1993 is still in print. And Morris was a genuine bestseller, chalking up 500,000 sales of the autobiographical title, Conundrum.

In his biography, Paul Clements quotes from one of Morris's best known introductions, the one which opens Venice, her magnificent book on the iconic Italian city.

This and her book on Oxford, named simply Oxford, graced many homes from the sixties onwards and it's not hard to understand why.

She wrote this characteristically quirky opening: "At 45°14' N, 12° 18' E, the navigator, sailing up the Adriatic coast of Italy, discovers an opening in the long low line of the shore: and turning westward, with the race of the tide, he enters a lagoon. Instantly the boisterous sting of the sea is lost. The water around him is shallow but opaque, the atmosphere is curiously translucent..."

Clearly not an academic style but it places Morris at the top of a school of travel writers, maybe old school but including the Eric Newbys and Patrick Leigh Fermors of this world.

Morris trained as a journalist after Oxford and joined The Times after the Second World War, becoming their star reporter. In 1953, she joined Edmund Hillary's attempt to conquer Everest and when he reached the summit, filed reports that enabled her to reach global recognition.

The only reporter on the expedition, she noted in rare understatement from Camp IV that a trudge through snow and ice was "extremely unpleasant". Never having climbed a big mountain before, Morris asked John Hunt whether it was usual to feel breathless at 17,000 feet.

Although the editors at The Times complained that Morris didn't file often enough, her reports were eagerly followed round the world. It was not an easy task and the journalist had to pay runners, who took her copy away from Everest to a collection point, nearly £300 a pop in today's money. This was a kind of pinnacle, but Morris always wanted to write books.

The Times did not allow its journalists to publish books so she moved to the Manchester Guardian, asking editor Alastair Hetherington if there was an opening.

Not immediately, he replied, even for a star writer. But something turned up and Morris gained her perfect writing gig, six months reporting and six months writing books.

Literary fame followed. Charles Monteith, educated at Inst in Belfast and Magdalen College in Oxford and an extremely talented literary publisher with TS Eliot's outfit, Faber & Faber, came across the new writer.

He had wanted to turn Morris's Everest reports into a book and was sorry when he couldn't shift The Times' embargo. "I needn't say how sorry I am," he wrote to Morris. But his offer to look at any future writing bore fruit.

The Lisburn man, rightly known at Faber for his acuity, talent spotted an incredible panoply of talent, including Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin and Paul Muldoon.

While Morris's wife, loyal and loving Elizabeth, knew from the outset that her husband, with whom she had five children, felt born in the wrong body (and liked to wear women's clothes sometimes), she had to divorce him when he changed sex.

They later remarried and finished their lives together in contented domesticity in Wales. They referred to themselves as sisters-in-law.

How did Clements feel about covering this? He knew he had to face up to it, as Jan herself had done. Clements comments now, looking at the fabulous cover image on his biography of Jan Morris in stripey summer dress, her hand to her neck.

"Was she trying to cover her Adam's apple? Who knows, but Jan said she was aware from a very early age, four or so, that she was born into the wrong body," he says.

Morris's gender journey was genuinely pioneering. Clements's account is both factual and sensitive. He says the Italian doctor who would perform realignment surgery in 1972 said to Morris the night before she would enter theatre as Mr, re-emerge Miss. People had died after this operation, and this was a truly brave move.

When discussing her predicament, Morris writes that it was connected to her passion for travel: "I have only lately come to see that incessant wandering as an outward expression of my inner journey. I have never doubted thought, that much of the emotional force, what the Welsh call hwyl, that men spend in sex, I sublimated in travel – perhaps in movement itself – as I have always loved speed, wind and great spaces...".

It was also brave in terms of public opinion. But Jan Morris successfully weathered the storm and went on to produce many more books, making a final tally of over 40, including a novel.

In her memoir, Conundrum, she writes about visiting Africa, employing the writing technique that her biographer describes as "taking the reader by the hand". Here she is on wart-hogs. "In a Kenya game park once I saw a family of wart-hogs waddling ungainly and in a tremendous hurry across the grass."

She could not help laughing, then added that her African companion rightly rebuked her. "You should not laugh at them... they are beautiful to each other."

:: Jan Morris: Life From Both Sides by Paul Clements is published by Scribe Publications on October 13.

The author will be in conversation with Noel Thompson at a special launch event at Waterstones in Belfast city centre on October 20 at 6pm.

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Acclaimed travel writer and historian Jan Morris dies at the age of 94 as tributes are paid to the transgender journalist who climbed Everest and broke news of its first ascent in 1953

• Jan Morris joined Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on their Everest ascent
• She was the first person to break the news of the successful mission in 1953
• Jan transitioned from a man to a woman in 1972 and wrote about her identity 

By Jack Newman For Mailonline

Published: 16:45 EDT, 20 November 2020 | Updated: 06:01 EDT, 21 November 2020

View comments

Acclaimed travel writer Jan Morris, who broke the news of Everest's first ascent, has died at the age of 94.

The author, who transitioned from a man to a woman in 1972, had dozens of books published throughout her illustrious career including her famous trilogy Pax Britannica on the British Empire. 

A statement from her agent said: 'This morning at 11.40 at Ysbyty Bryn Beryl near Pwllheli in Llyn, Wales, Jan Morris, author and traveller, set off on her greatest journey.

'She leaves behind her partner of seventy years, Elizabeth, and their four children.' 

Acclaimed travel writer Jan Morris, who broke the news of Everest's first ascent, has died at the age of 94

Born James Humphrey Morris in Somerset, with a Welsh father and English mother, Morris remembered questioning her gender by age four. 

She had an epiphany as she sat under her mother's piano and thought that she had 'been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.' 

In her book Conundrum, which details her ten-year transition, she recalled age three or four, that she had been 'born in the wrong body'.  

Jan joined the army in 1943 and served in the World War II in Palestine before studying English at Oxford University.

Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss in 1949 and they had five children together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys and in 1972 she completed hormone therapy with surgery. 

She was later  sent by The Times to accompany Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on their Everest mission on 1953, after she was chosen for her fitness, and was the first person to report their successful ascent, which broke on the day of the Queen's coronation.

The author transitioned from a man to a woman in 1972

She was so concerned that rival reporters would steal her scoop she used coded language for the dispatch back home, relayed through an India military radio outpost: 'Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.'

The message, once decoded, meant: 'Summit of Everest reached on 29 May by Hillary and Tenzing,' according to The Times . 

Morris, who had never climbed a mountain before, was the last surviving member of the British Everest expedition. 

The following year she travelled from ew. York to Los Angeles which resulted in her first book, Coast to Coast, in 1956. 

In the same year, for the Manchester Guardian, she helped break the news that French forces were secretly attacking Egypt during the so-called Suez Canal crisis that threatened to start a world war. 

The French and British, who also were allied against Egypt, both withdrew in embarrassment after denying the initial reports and British prime minister Anthony Eden resigned within months. In the early 1960s, she covered Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem. 

Morris, who penned more than 40 books, went on to receive praise for her immersive travel writing, with Venice and Trieste among the favored locations, and for her 'Pax Britannica' histories about the British empire, a trilogy begun as James Morris and concluded as Jan Morris.  

In 1985, she was a Booker Prize finalist for an imagined travelogue and political thriller, 'Last Letters from Hav,' about a Mediterranean city-state that was a stopping point for the author's globe-spanning knowledge and adventures, where visitors ranged from Saint Paul and Marco Polo to Ernest Hemingway and Sigmund Freud.

The book was reissued 21 years later as part of 'Hav,' which included a sequel by Morris and an introduction from the science fiction-fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin.

'I read it ('Hav') as a brilliant description of the crossroads of the West and East ... viewed by a woman who has truly seen the world, and who lives in it with twice the intensity of most of us,' Le Guin wrote.

Morris' other works included the memoirs 'Herstory' and 'Pleasures of a Tangled Life,' the essay collections 'Cities' and 'Locations' and the anthology 'The World: Life and Travel 1950-2000.' 

A collection of diary entries, 'In My Mind's Eye,' came out in 2019, and a second volume is scheduled for January. 'Allegorizings,' a nonfiction book of personal reflections that she wrote more than a decade ago and asked not be published in her lifetime, also will be released in 2021.

She was sent by The Times to accompany Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on their Everest mission on 1953

For some 20 years she kept her gender feelings secret, a 'cherished' secret that became a prayer when at Oxford University she and fellow students would observe a moment of silence while worshipping at the school cathedral.

'Into that hiatus, while my betters I suppose were asking for forgiveness or enlightenment, I inserted silently every night, year after year throughout my boyhood, an appeal less graceful but no less heartfelt: 'And please, God, let me be a girl. Amen,' Morris wrote in her memoir.

'I felt that in wishing so fervently, and so ceaselessly, to be translated into a girl's body, I was aiming only at a more divine condition, an inner reconciliation.'

To the outside world, James Morris seemed to enjoy an exemplary male life. She was 17 when she joined the British army during World War II, served as an intelligence officer in Palestine and mastered the 'military virtues of 'courage, dash, loyalty, self-discipline.' In 1949, Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, with whom she had five children. (One died in infancy).

But privately she felt 'dark with indecision and anxiety' and even considered suicide. She had traveled the 'long, well-beaten, expensive, and fruitless path' of psychiatrists and sexologists. She had concluded that no one in her situation had ever, 'in the whole history of psychiatry, been 'cured' by the science.'

Life as a woman changed how Morris saw the world and how the world saw Morris. She would internalize perceptions that she couldn't fix a car or lift a heavy suitcase, found herself treated as an inferior by men and a confidante by women. She learned that there is 'no aspect of existence, no moment of the day, no contact, no arrangement, no response, which is not different for men and women.'

Morris and her wife were divorced, but they remained close, and, in 2008, formalized a new bond in a civil union. They also promised to be buried together, under a stone inscribed in both Welsh and England: 'Here lie two friends, at the end of one life.' 

In 2018, Morris told The Financial Times that her transition had not changed her writing 'in the slightest'.

She also revealed how she thought of herself as 'both man and woman. Or a mixture of both'.

Morris' publisher Faber Books paid tribute to her in a statement.

'A trailblazer and an extraordinary life force, her wonderful, generous books opened up the world for so many people. We are honoured to have been her publisher for over 60 years.'

Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford also shared a message about the writer.

'Very sad to hear of the passing of Jan Morris,' he tweeted. 'Such an incredibly talented author and what an amazing life she had.

'She was a real treasure to Wales. My thoughts are with her family and friends at this time.'

Historian William Dalrymple tweeted: 'RIP the great Jan Morris- a lifelong literary inspiration and one of the funniest, liveliest and most wonderful people I've ever had the pleasure of getting to know.'  

Author Kate Mosse labelled Morris an 'extraordinary woman'.

She scooped the world when Everest was conquered, wrote sublimely of travel odysseys - and, decades after changing gender, remarried the love of her life. As she dies aged 94 RICHARD KAY reveals why Jan Morris was the boldest adventurer

To say Jan Morris lived a little is an understatement. It was she who broke the news to the world of Hillary and Tenzing's conquest of Everest, and she was the first reporter to reveal France's secretive role in what became the Suez Crisis.

As a prolific author, historian and travel writer, her books — which included Pax Britannica, a magisterial history of the British Empire — were instant bestsellers. She also enjoyed a long and happy marriage, with four children.

But this was only a fraction of the achievements of the woman whose death at the age of 94 was announced yesterday by her son Twm.

Transition: Jan, pictured in 1965

Perhaps her greatest accomplishment was her transition from male to female, long before such a phrase was the accepted term and when it was more bluntly labelled a 'sex-change' operation.

In 1974 she provided an account, in her autobiography Conundrum, of the then pioneering gender reassignment surgery in Casablanca that turned her from James to Jan. But what happened afterwards was even more remarkable.

For she remained in love with the woman who had been her wife and borne her three sons and a daughter, and a fifth child who died in infancy.

Convention at the time meant they had to divorce — two women could not remain married. But such was their affection for one another, they continued to live together.

Then 12 years ago, with the liberalising of social laws, they repeated in a civil partnership ceremony the vows they had taken almost 60 years earlier.

Theirs was a union of utter devotion, as their son poignantly acknowledged in announcing Jan's death: 'This morning at 11.40 . . . the author and traveller Jan Morris began her greatest journey. She leaves behind on the shore her lifelong partner, Elizabeth.'

For years after that register office civil union, Elizabeth continued to call herself 'Mrs Morris'. They had lived under the same roof, in a cottage between the sea and the mountains in North Wales, for decades.

And as Elizabeth said after the 2008 ceremony: 'We didn't want to divorce — we loved each other very much — but we were told we had to because two women cannot be man and wife.' She added: 'It's rather nice to be legal again.'

It was an extraordinary love that enabled them to survive the emotional trauma of gender reassignment surgery and remain so contentedly both a couple and proud parents.

The depth of the relationship was illustrated movingly in Conundrum, written two years after Jan's transition.

In it, she recalls her agonising uncertainties about her gender and describes how James Morris, at the age of four, sat listening to his mother playing the piano and realised that although he was in boy's clothes, his male body was Nature's mistake.

As she wrote in Conundrum, at first it was 'cherished as a secret', the 'conviction of mistaken sex . . . no more than a blur, tucked away at the back of my mind'. But throughout childhood there was 'a yearning for I knew not what, as though there were a piece missing from my pattern, or some element in me that should be hard and permanent but was instead soluble and diffuse'.

Born in Somerset in 1926, Morris joined the Army in 1943, serving as an intelligence officer in Palestine before returning to read English at Oxford.

In 1949 he arrived in London to take a course in Arabic, moving into a room in a house close to Madame Tussauds.

Perhaps her greatest accomplishment was her transition from male to female, long before such a phrase was the accepted term and when it was more bluntly labelled a 'sex-change' operation

Living in the same house was Elizabeth, a tea-planter's daughter, who had just emerged from a broken engagement and was working as a secretary to Maxwell Ayrton, a leading architect.

In the misery of his sexual uncertainty, Morris felt himself in 'a remote and eerie capsule'. But after meeting Elizabeth, he found himself enjoying 'one particular love of an intensity so different from all the rest, on a plane of experience so mysterious, and of a texture so rich, that it overrode from the start all my sexual ambiguities and acted like a key to the latch of my conundrum'.

James and Elizabeth were 'so instantly, utterly, improbably and permanently attuned to one another that we might have been brother and sister.

'I would not say there were no secrets at all between us, for every human being, I think, has a right to a locked corner in the mind; but most of our thoughts were shared, and often we need not translate them into words.

'We loved each other's company so much that I often went with her to her office in Hampstead, just for the pleasure of the bus ride.'

There were, of course, occasional spats in the years when Jan was still James and they were married. Once Elizabeth threw a saucepan at him, and on a train journey to Windsor she slapped his face. But they were soulmates.

Morris describes as 'the happiest moments of my existence' arriving home from a faraway trip and meeting Elizabeth 'in the forecourt of Terminal 3 (to be) exalted again in our friendship'.

Their children were born from that same deep love. Morris wrote: 'In performing the sexual act with Elizabeth, I felt I was consummating a trust, with luck giving ourselves the incomparable gift of children; and she on her side, obeying some mystic alchemy.'

The marriage 'had no right to work, yet it worked like a dream, living testimony, one might say, to the power of . . . love in its purest sense over everything else'.

People, she said, were often baffled by its nature but it was never strange to her.

Morris hid nothing of his dilemma from Elizabeth and she fully understood the battle he was fighting inside — and that, as Morris says, 'through each year, my every instinct seemed to become more feminine'.

All this time, Morris was making his mark as a journalist.

In 1953 The Times sent him to accompany Sir Edmund Hillary on his ascent of Everest. Morris preserved his scoop by hurrying down the mountain and wiring a coded message to the news desk: 'Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.'

The story appeared on the front page the morning Elizabeth II was crowned Queen, prompting a rival newspaper's headline on the coronation: 'All this and Everest too.'

Morris began writing the Pax Britannica trilogy as a man but by the time she finished it, she was a woman. She had begun transitioning in 1964 but had to travel to Morocco for surgery because doctors in Britain refused unless Morris and Elizabeth divorced —something that at the time the writer was not prepared to do.

Elizabeth was loyal and steadfast and family life continued much as it had before. James, now Jan, wrote brilliant travel books — her cultural history of Venice drew international attention to the rotting city — but Conundrum, although a bestseller, left friends and critics unsure.

For her part, Morris said nothing much changed, certainly not in rural Wales, and no one batted an eyelid. 'I put it down to kindness,' she said this year. 'Just that.'

Even death will not separate the couple. They have made arrangements to lie side by side by their house on the River Dwyfor.

The wording on the single headstone is already decided: 'Here are two friends at the end of one life.' 

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12 of the Best Books by Trans Authors That You Need to Read

We're living in a trans literature renaissance.

Our editors handpick the products that we feature. We may earn commission from the links on this page.

For years, the majority of trans writing published in the United States was confined to memoirs of transition—often written to satisfy cisgender readers’ curiosity about the medical and social process of gender confirmation. By contrast, this current crop of trans authors has been working in every genre, taking on every stage of trans life across widely varied cultures, classes, and epistemologies. Want a graphic memoir of an Indian-American trans woman’s life in Brooklyn? You’ve got options. Interested in poetry that lyrically documents the experience of Black trans men in the South? Make space on your bookshelf. Fantasy? Plenty of that, too.

The majority of trans writers are still working in small communities with limited distribution, but indie presses such as Arsenal Pulp , Metonymy , and Topside Press have found success by centering trans writing at the core of their lists. Trans authors of previous generations—like Leslie Feinberg or Louis Sullivan —whose far-sighted work had fallen out of publication, have posthumously found new publishers. Even the big five publishers have taken note. In the larger reckoning with questions of whose stories have been privileged, editors have turned their attention to the potentials of trans literature, and the coming year or two will see a number of exciting trans debuts.

Among this current flourishing of trans literature, here are 12 books that you can pick up at your local bookstore today.

Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

Prepare yourself for some of the sexiest footnotes in literature. In this clever romp, a trans academic, Dr. Voth, annotates a secret history of the famous 18th century London criminal Jack Sheppard. But as Voth’s manuscript unfolds, it reveals an urgent manifesto for would-be jailbreakers of our own time.

Fairest by Meredith Talusan

Gender is only one of the transitions in Talusan’s graceful memoir, a book that is at once a trans Künstlerroman and an autobiography of albinism, immigration, Filipino culture, racial passing, and childhood television stardom. Read an excerpt of Fairest here . 

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

On a spaceship shuttling refugees to the Promised Land, the ruling class recreates the logic of a plantation. Down on the lower decks, Aster, an ambiguously gendered and dark skinned orphan, plots to uncover the disturbing truth of the regime. This is a book that many trans writers point to when discussing the thrilling possibilities of trans thought in sci-fi literature. 

Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through by T Fleischmann

Reminiscent of W.G. Sebald (if Sebald were non-binary and joyfully slutty), Fleischmann’s nonfiction work investigates everything from the art of Felix Gonzalez Torres, the formation of ice, and their own friends and lovers in the trans communities of New York, Chicago, and the rural South.

The Subtweet by Vivek Shraya

Shraya is an artist at home in many disciplines—pop music, poetry, nonfiction—and in her novel, writing with all the zippy thrill of good gossip, she recounts the rivalry of music industry frenemies Neela and RUK-MINI as they make music in the age of social media and internet mobbing.

Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More by Janet Mock

Janet Mock published this memoir in 2014, the year Time Magazine declared “The Transgender Tipping Point." Annd Mock didn’t just redefine realness; she redefined how trans women of color are talked about in our culture. Mock struck a widely-emulated balance in her writing by bringing awareness to the intersection of racism and transphobia uniquely faced by trans women of color, while emphasizing possibilities of beauty, joy, and success, carved out from the threat of that danger.

The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

Yes, the title tells you what happens. But the beauty and heartbreak and mystery of the life of Vivek Oji provide the why . In the Anglophone world, political battles over trans acceptance are frequently waged in the media around questions of medicalization and identity. Emezi has a gift for eliding the tired terms of these fights to offer, instead, spiritual and non-Western possibilities for gender. 

the earthquake room by Davey Davis

After K infects her girlfriend, Bea, with an undiagnosed disease, she loses herself in an apocalyptic quest for atonement. A haunting, spare story set in an Oakland besieged by natural disaster, Davis’s novel explores queer intimacy and resistance in a world where the future is always in question. The title of this book, published by the tiny Tiger Bee press, is often mentioned when trans mascs of a certain type discuss how they figured out they were trans.  

Little Fish by Casey Plett

This Lambda Award-winning novel is about a young Winnipeg trans woman struggling with friendship and sex work while investigating whether her Mennonite grandfather also might have been trans. It's so beloved in certain trans femme circles that any used copy you’re likely to find will be dog-eared from having been passed hand to hand.

Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel by Julian K. Jarboe

Jarboe has described this story collection as “mid-apocalyptic,” which might perfectly describe our contemporary moment. Jarboe brings everything from dark humor to surrealism to Catholic cyberpunk in order to make these sci-fi allegories reflect our times.

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom

The realist epistemology of memoirs doesn’t usually meld easily with existence of the supernatural. But once you get into this story, you stop questioning what’s real. The magical elements reframe the routine struggles faced by trans women, injecting familiar narratives with a jolt of the unknown so that they hit as if for the first time. Kai Cheng Thom has made a name for herself parsing the ethics of queer culture and activism, and that wisdom and care is why you’ll find this book on the shelves of young trans women across North America.

Thinking Again: A Diary by Jan Morris

Ninety three-year-old Welsh travel writer Jan Morris has been writing for the better part of a century. Among the many chapters of her long life: she ascended Mt. Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary, authored the Pax Britannica trilogy, and transitioned in 1972. Last year, she published a diary that she says will be her final book, a droll, poignant, and elegiac document of a life fully-lived.  

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The Liberating Power of Solo Travel As a Trans Woman

Solo travel as a transgender woman can be a joyful, liberating experience — here's one writer's experience.

Much of the writing about traveling while transgender is decidedly negative. I would know — I've written some of it. Travel as a trans person can be frustrating, heartbreaking, and even dangerous; from the indignities of airport TSA checkpoints to the constant stares in small towns to outright discrimination and violence, there's much to persuade one to simply remain safely and comfortably at home. But those struggles are not the whole story; solo travel as a transgender woman can also be an incredibly joyful, liberating experience.

Trans Invisibility

When I touch down at an airport or cross over into a city's limits, I have an opportunity I don't get at home: anonymity. I get to be just another face in the crowd, a stranger — an outsider because of my origin, not exclusively because of my gender.

One of the reasons gender transition can be a traumatic experience is because even supportive friends and loved ones knew you as a different person — often for much longer than they've known you as your current self. Despite their best efforts, they'll likely continue to think of you as that person until a considerable effort has been made or amount of time has passed. But when I introduce myself to someone in a new city or country, they only know the name, gender, and backstory I give them.

Omission of unnecessary truths is a soothing reprieve from reality, but it gets better: There are also few, if any, consequences if I outright lie. To my new acquaintances, I'm a professional travel writer, a copyright lawyer, and a singer-songwriter. I essentially have carte blanche to creatively remake myself in every new location, to try on new identities if I choose — and then, whether or not it works, I'm off to the next location, nothing but a fabulous memory.

Trans visibility is a frequent media discourse item. But one of the primary joys, for me, of travel? Trans invisibility .

Activism Through Existence

According to many mainstream narratives about trans lives, including much of that made by trans women ourselves, we're essentially doomed . We're destined to hardscrabble lives of ostracization and struggle, desperate for love, but unable to find it, and at consistent risk of murder. No wonder so many people are terrified their kids will be trans and want to prevent this by making it illegal . In February of this year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott called on the general public to report the parents of transgender minors receiving gender-affirming medical care, stating in a letter that it's "child abuse."

Depending on who you listen to, trans women of color have a life expectancy of only 30 or 35 years . Though this statistic is spread primarily by allies and even members of our community, it's not only untrue , but it's a damaging falsehood with major unintended consequences.

I've been thinking a lot about that statistic, lately. I turn 35 this year.

Just by not dying in the next few months, I'm providing a counter-narrative. By getting out into the world, I'm evidence that there's hope. I am a trans woman of color and I'm happy. I have a great job and am on vacation traveling the world. I occasionally have access to and enjoy nice things. By existing, I'm living proof that being trans isn't anywhere close to the worst thing that one can be. I always hope a young trans or questioning child will see me out and about, smiling, laughing, and thriving, and question what they've been taught.

The Beauty of Trans Embodiment

I've been to Rome and Florence; to Santiago and Bogotá; to Los Angeles, Seattle, Atlanta, Indianapolis, and Washington, DC. But my favorite travel experiences have been far outside major cities.

Whether backpacking through Yosemite to the top of El Capitan, trekking through the jungles of Colombia to the "Lost City," or standing less than 30 meters from a herd of wild elephants in Mole National Park in Ghana, my primary motivation when traveling is to experience nature. Doing so both adds beauty to my life and reminds me of the power and pleasure of trans embodiment.

The aforementioned mainstream narrative also says trans people are all "born in the wrong body" and experience life-threatening body dysphoria. It's often even required to self-report as much in order to access transition-related medical care. Now, that is true for many of us. But not me. I love my trans body.

It takes me across the world. And by traveling, I write a love letter to my body just by being in it and continuing to walk the Earth. When I'm in nature, I'm at peace. There's no criminalization, no discrimination, no discourse. Just animals, trees, and mountains — and me, walking or hiking among them. I'm treated by nature as a human being without qualification. Active embodiment like this is, for me, the purest form of self-love.

I'm not interested in sugarcoating reality. I have countless extra preparation steps to make when I travel — for my own safety — that most cisgender people will never have to consider. And yet, I prioritize travel because in doing so I experience the joy and liberation those who hate me would love to see me denied. Traveling solo as a trans woman, like transition itself, carries risks. But it also carries exhilarating potential — and in both cases, taking the risk has always been worth it.

Related Articles

16 of the Best LGBTQ+ Travel Books

• 1 September, 2020

Not just for people who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community but for all allies and travellers, these books – some fiction, others travelogues and memoirs – shed a ray of light on the queer experience as we journey around the world.

01 September, 2020

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness. Mark Twain

T aking Taking heed of Mark Twain’s famous words, we’ve rummaged through the travel section of the library to find some of our favourite titles that celebrate the pride, perseverance and experience of the LGBTQ+ community across the globe.

Expect simmering lesbian romances that step up a gear on US road trips, thought-provoking real-life stories from gay men travelling in the Middle East and cult-classic titles that have helped to transform our ideas of gender and sexual identity. Not just for people who consider themselves queer or otherwise, these books – some fiction, others travelogues and memoirs – are for all allies and travellers.

16 of the best queer travel books: the LGBTQ+ reading list that transports you around the world

Queer Intentions

by Amelia Abraham

As the western LGBTQ+ community enjoys unprecedented freedom, this book asks whether same-sex marriage, better visibility and corporate endorsement are really so great after all. In it, Abraham takes readers to LA’s biggest drag convention, parties in Turkey’s underground queer scene and catches up with a genderless family in Stockholm.

by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Leaving her five-year-old daughter in Kingston, Jamaica, Patsy travels to Brooklyn in search of a better life and love. Instead, she faces the reality of being a Black, undocumented immigrant. Winner of the 2020 Lambda Lesbian Fiction award, this is a portrait of women who don’t conform to expectations in a society ruled by race and class.

Giovanni’s Room

by James Baldwin

Weaving together themes of sex, love and shame, Giovanni’s Room is a cult queer classic – many of the people and places featured are inspired by the author’s experience living in the City of Light. We encounter hustlers and queens, and peep inside the queer cafés and bars of 50s Paris. Like this? Read Tomasz Jedrowski’s Swimming in the Dark, in which two men in 80s Poland form a secret bond over an illicit copy of, you guessed it, Giovanni’s Room.

by Jan Morris

With a career spanning more than six decades and landmark titles including Venice, Oxford and Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere under her belt, Jan Morris is perhaps one of Britain’s best-loved and most prolific travel writers. Published in 1974 – the same year as the First National TV/TS (Transvestite/Transsexual Conference) was held and a time when homosexuality was still considered criminal in parts of the UK – Conundrum is a candid and progressive account of her life, travels and 10-year transition between genders.

by André Aciman

Chances are you came across the coming-of-age Call Me By Your Name through the 2017 film starring Timothée Chalamet. Yet the tale started life a decade earlier as a book. Find Me is André Aciman’s sequel, which picks up decades after Elio and Oliver meet in Italy. In it, we meet Sami, Elio’s father, who undergoes a sexual awakening after a chance encounter.

You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

Spiriting us between New York, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine, You Exist Too Much follows a Palestinian-American girl as she grows from self-conscious teen to a queer, sought-after DJ with an insatiable “love addiction”. It’s a story in which we feel the push-pull between cultural, religious and sexual identities and one driven by a longing for love and home.

Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East

by Benjamin Law

Australian Benjamin is a proud, married “gaysian” – but life would have been different had he been raised in Asia like his migrant parents. As he follows his curiosity to the continent, he invites readers to join him as he goes nude in Balinese sex resorts, meets Thai ladyboys at a beauty pageant and takes Indian yoga classes designed to cure his homosexuality.

Gears for Queers

by Abigail Melton and Lilith Cooper

Queer couple Abigail and Lilith don’t conform to the stereotypes of most cross-country cyclists. Their bikes are basic, their kit inexpensive and their bodies don’t look like Bradley Wiggins’ does. This memoir of their journey from Amsterdam to Spain is a tale of prejudice and perseverance as they face physical and social challenges while testing their relationship.

by Andrew Sean Greer

This Pulitzer-winning novel follows the hapless, knocking-on-50 novelist Arthur Less who, on receiving a wedding invitation from his former beau, packs a fuchsia-lined suit and sets off on a cathartic misadventure from Mexico to Morocco, Italy to India and beyond. It paints a satirical picture of the American abroad and a profound rendering of the human heart.

States of Desire: Travels in Gay America

by Edmund White

While LGBTQ+ travel writers precede White, he was among the first to put his sexuality front and centre in this 1980 travelogue. (Three years earlier he had co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex.) Written in the aftermath of the Stonewall Riots, the book takes us beyond the glittering 70s nightlife spots to meet gay cowboys, computer experts and a self-appointed Mormon prophet. Poignantly, States of Desire ends just before the AIDS crisis which would devastate many of the communities through which White travelled. For 21st-century perspective, try Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States by trans author Samantha Allen.

We All Loved Cowboys

by Carol Bensimon

Despite having fallen out, Julia and Cora go ahead with a long-planned road trip through Brazil, and their relationship blossoms into something more than friendship. Originally published in Portuguese, this is a short but moving tale of love on the run, and one for which Granta ranked Bensimon among Brazil’s best young novelists.

Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab

by Shani Mootoo

This is a tale of love, loss and acceptance interwoven with themes of gender identity, family and issues around immigration. Jonathan grew up in tree-lined Toronto. Aged nine, his mother leaves. Now grown, he reaches out to find that she has become a well-to-do man named Sydney who lives in Trinidad.

by Virginia Woolf

Published in 1928 at the height of Woolf’s career, Orlando was inspired by Virginia’s lover, Vita Sackville-West. Bending the concepts of sex and time – this fantastical historical biography spans 400 years, though its gender-swapping protagonist ages but 36 – the novel skirts around explicit descriptions of homosexuality but is replete with queer undertones. Radclyffe Hall’s seminal lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was released (and banned for obscenity) in the same year.

Gay Travels In The Muslim World

by Michael T. Luongo

Homosexuality may be illegal in many Middle Eastern countries, but the LGBTQ+ community still exists. This anthology gives their stories a platform. Crossing national, racial and religious borders while entering war zones, it brings together accounts from some of the region’s gay, male travellers in a bid to challenge readers’ preconceptions.

To Shake the Sleeping Self

by Jedidiah Jenkins

Our outward travels can spark inner journeys too, and Jenkins’ travelogue is a testament to that. On the eve of turning 30, he quits his job to spend 16 months cycling from Oregon to Patagonia with a burning question: what makes life worth living? Travelling across cities and mountains, he reconciles his sexual identity with his conservative Christian childhood.

The Price of Salt

by Patricia Highsmith

Though better known as “Carol” since the 2015 film adaptation, The Price of Salt is a simmering story of a forbidden love affair between aspiring female photographer, Therese and Carol, a suburban housewife navigating a tricky divorce in 50s New York – and their romance blossoms on a road trip west to Utah. When the book was published in 1952, Highsmith used a pseudonym for fear of being labelled a “lesbian-book writer”, while the tale made its mark as the first homosexual novel to have a happy ending.

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Visibility mixes with vulnerability for many transgender travelers

The travel industry has embraced Pride Month, but for some transgender and nonbinary people leaving home triggers anxiety.

Denne Michele came out as a transgender woman to different people in her life over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic . But a recent trip to Los Angeles helped her realize she was ready to come out publicly.

Michele flew from New York City to Los Angeles in May to record Food 4 Thot —a queer, brown podcast—with her cohosts who already knew her as a woman named Denne.  

“When we were in the studio, I felt like I was living my entire life for those few days as a trans woman,” Michele says.  

Being out of her everyday environment and experiencing the joy of being recognized for who she was made her realize it was time to fully come out. Now, as the world is reopening, Michele said she’s ready to be her full self wherever she goes.

She’s not the only one. Without the pressure to “perform” gender and with more time for self-reflection during the quarantine, some people confronted their gender identities when they may not have otherwise; many came out as transgender . A 2020 Gallup poll   found that 5.6 percent of Americans identify as LGBTQ—up from 4.5 percent in 2017. And while overall only 0.6 percent of Americans identify as transgender, that number is 1.2 percent among millennials and 1.8 percent among Gen Z.  

Now, as the world reopens, many transgender people are going through life as their true selves for the first time. The hurdles they overcome while traveling are just one part of the story.  

A time of transition  

Harper Sinclare came out as trans early in the pandemic—for the second time. She first came out four years ago, but had trouble working a public-facing customer service job in the earliest stages of her transition.  

“At the time, I had no close trans friends or role models, so I felt like it was me against the world, and the pressure was too much,” Sinclare says.  

The privacy of quarantine gave her a chance to focus on her own wants and needs, with the support of her partner and family, and without interference from the outside world.  

“The quarantine guaranteed there wasn’t a moment I felt lonely or unsupported,” Sinclare says. “Being stuck at home felt like a necessary cocoon and a blessing, but now it’s starting to give me a little cabin-fever.”

In June she flew out from Canada to San Francisco for facial feminization surgery, but was nervous about traveling to a former COVID-19 hotspot —and also about traveling as a trans woman for the first time.  

So far, San Francisco has seemed like the right choice. Sinclare says she has yet to be misgendered on the trip. But she still has some apprehension about future travel and meeting new people as the world opens up.  

“I can no longer just accept that they will take me at face value and respect my [gender] identity, so my brain is constantly running calculations and analyzing everything strangers say to me for any reason to be afraid,” Sinclare says. “It’s honestly exhausting.”  

Karen DeJarnette is familiar with that feeling. As an out trans woman and an SEO manager for a major travel agency, DeJarnette has a lot of experience traveling as a trans person and all the challenges that come with it.  

For trans people, and especially trans women, “we feel vulnerable, we feel extremely visible, and traveling to someplace new amplifies that, beyond measure.”  

A 2019 ProPublica investigation found that 5 percent of civil rights complaints filed with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) between January of 2016 and April of 2019 were from trans and gender-nonconforming individuals, even though transgender people make up less than one percent of the population. 2020 was the deadliest year on record for anti-trans violence, with 44 documented homicides, and 2021 is set to surpass that , with 28 documented homicides so far. Most of that violence is targeted at trans women and specifically trans women of color .    

( Does travel mean going into the closet? LGBTQ tourists face tough choices .)

The Washington Post recently reported   on the trauma of travel for trans people, noting that “the discrimination trans travelers have experienced at the hands of the TSA…[has] become so widespread that there is a hashtag—#TravelingWhileTrans—that travelers have used to share encounters with TSA.”

But DeJarnette says it’s important to remember that most people won’t notice or care, because they’re preoccupied with their own lives. But for trans people who have to travel for work or other reasons out of their control, she recommends traveling with someone else and being aware of the cultures and customs, especially in more conservative places .  

“The whole goal is to fit in, is to just be one among the crowds,” DeJarnette says. “Because that way, you’re less exposed, less vulnerable.”

Advice for trans travelers

Michele is excited to start traveling to queer vacation spots like Palm Springs , California or Fire Island , New York—but this time as her full self. “Being in that kind of environment again, but just fully leaning into all of my femininity is really exciting to me,” Michele says.  

Prior to the pandemic and her coming out she presented as feminine and wore women’s clothes. Because she has not yet been able to start hormone replacement therapy, most of her transition so far has been social. Michele has already had to face some of the challenges that come with moving through the world as a trans person, like being misgendered—an experience that can trigger a sense of dysphoria.  

Gender dysphoria can take many forms— social, mental, and physical   to name a few—and while all can create a feeling of intense discomfort or distress, social dysphoria was largely avoidable while the country was in lockdown. As those return to work and their social lives, it presents new challenges for people early in their transitions.

When traveling for leisure, DeJarnette recommends doing research before going somewhere new, as there are plenty of LGBTQ friendly countries , cities , and neighborhoods . San Francisco even designated southeastern Tenderloin as a   transgender cultural district in 2017.  

The Human Rights Campaign state equality index provides helpful context for travelers in the U.S. and the app GeoSure provides LGBTQ safety ratings for more than 30,000 neighborhoods globally.  

“Stay in a place that welcomes you,” DeJarnette says. “There are cities and locations and neighborhoods that will be happy to have your business.”  

( Intimate portraits of survivors in places where love is illegal .)

Air travel can be especially challenging. The National Center for Transgender Equality’s guide to airport security has tips on how to talk to TSA, what to do if your ID doesn’t match your gender presentation, and how to file a complaint if there’s an issue, among other things. DeJarnette also recommends traveling with a friend or other trusted person whenever possible to have an advocate and to alleviate some of the anxiety that comes with traveling while trans.

Kam Burns is an engagement editor at Politico with a focus on new and emerging platforms. His writing centers on mental health, LGBTQ issues, and pop culture. Kam is a founding member of the Trans Journalists Association and co-author of the TJA Style Guide .

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Join GLAAD and take action for acceptance.

The glaad wrap: “prom dates” streaming now, “god isn’t ready for me yet” documentary kickstarter, new music from ceara cavalieri, rae isla, and more, thomas orlina drops new pop hit “tell me your name”.

• Input from GLAAD for Oversight Board on “Explicit AI Images of Female Public Figures” Cases

Must-See LGBTQ TV: May Premieres & Returns

• WATCH: GLAAD Chats with Cast and Crew of HBO’s “We’re Here” Ahead of New Season
• Drop in on Houston’s Newest Space for Black LGBTQ Empowerment
• GLAAD and the Black List Announce Call for Submissions for The 2024 GLAAD List
• LGBTQ Stars Recognized with 77th Annual Tony Awards Nominations

Meet the seven trans writers on the 2022 GLAAD List

( Clockwise from top:  Rain Valdez, Noni Salma, Zeke Smith, NOVA CYPRESS BLACK, Jett Garrison, Sav Rodgers, Dana Aliya Levinson)

As anti-transgender legislation sweeps the United States, it is more important than ever to highlight the trans writers and creators, from diverse backgrounds and experiences, who are telling stories that emphasize our shared humanity. GLAAD, in partnership with The Black List, recently announced The 2022 GLAAD List, a curated list of the most promising unmade LGBTQ-inclusive scripts in Hollywood that have been hosted on blcklst.com . (To read more about the entire 2022 GLAAD List, click  here .) The scripts on The GLAAD List represent the type of stories that GLAAD would like to see studios producing on big and small screens.

GLAAD is proud to have selected seven projects written by talented transgender writers. (See below for short bios of each writer.) In the screenplays they submitted, these writers centered LGBTQ protagonists in stories that were not solely about their identities, but instead placed multi-dimensional characters in tales that range from rom-com to thriller to sci-fi to sitcom and beyond. The seven projects are:

FEATURE FILMS

I LOVE YOU, MARGOT ROBBIE by Sav Rodgers and Taylor Gates A teenage trans boy navigates first loves, broken bones, and high school woes with the help of his imaginary friend: A-list actor Margot Robbie.

QUICK QUICK SLOW by Jett Garrison It’s 1992 and Jesse McAllen’s been kicked out of the military for being gay. Disowned by her small town family, she buses it to Austin, Texas where she’s taken in by two queer men running a gay country and western bar.

RE-LIVE: A TALE OF AN AMERICAN ISLAND CHEERLEADER by Rain Valdez and Rachel Leyco A transgender woman returns to her estranged home island of Guam for her High School Reunion’s “Do Over week” to live out her childhood dream of becoming a cheerleader, but she discovers a different reunion – family.

WASPS! By Zeke Smith A video game designer fighting imposter syndrome is dragged along by his mother on a cross-country road trip in which he must break out of his self-imposed limitations to thwart the WASPS (White Anglo Saxon Protestants) who pursue them.

BADASS by Noni Salma At the cusp of a precarious episode that turned her into an internet viral sensation, a down on her luck trans woman must team up with her devious friends in hopes of extending this 15 minutes of fame.

BLACKSEED by NOVA CYPRESS BLACK When a non-binary adoptee’s 21st birthday arrives with news that they have 6 months to live, they apply to join a life-saving Black town with hideous secrets.

FRAUD by Dana Aliya Levinson Shira Rose Loewenstein, a Jewish trans woman struggling to escape her fucked up family through her side hustle as a credit card thief, is recruited into a dangerous criminal enterprise that is hell-bent on taking down the one percent.

GLAAD asked each of these trailblazing writers about the state of trans and queer representation on screen and where they’d like to see it go in the future.

Sav Rodgers, co-writer of  I Love You, Margot Robbie : “The vast majority of Americans don’t believe they personally know a trans person, which means that what they see in the media informs everything they know about our community.”

Dana Aliya Levinson, writer of  FRAUD : “I deeply crave more trans stories in which a character’s transness informs how they navigate the story without being  the  story … in real life our identities affect how we move through the world in far more subtle and intersectional ways. This nuance actually creates more universality and humanity.”

NOVA CYPRESS BLACK, writer of  Blackseed : “I’m always thirsty for more trans stories that center Black gender expansive folks. … Trans characters who are actively divesting from cisheteropatriarchy. I wanna see more non-white non-light-skinned trans characters fall in love WITH EACH OTHER.”

The desire to push beyond transition or coming out narratives was something all our writers said was deeply important.

Rain Valdez, co-writer of  Re-Live: A Tale of an American Island Cheerleader , expressed a desire for, “more stories about healing and love.” “There is more to us than our struggle and we have yet to see what that looks like on the screen. It’s as if this industry is obsessed with our origin story and isn’t sure if there’s anything worth telling past that.”

Jett Garrison, writer of  Quick Quick Slow : “I also think we’ve seen many narratives that point to an illusion that once you ‘transition’ (whatever that means for each of us) then everything is fine and sorted. I feel it’s all more layered and nuanced than that – like, what comes next?”

Noni Salma, writer of  Badass : “As much as I think it is important to tell the trans 101 stories of how a person embarks on the journey of their transition, we need more balance to even it out. We need comedies of trans women navigating the world where their trans-ness isn’t the punchline. Black trans women in particular are some of the most wickedly funny beings on earth and I think the genre of comedy can tap into that.”

She continued, “… If the story isn’t centering cis-ness or catering to their perspective, would it get anywhere in Hollywood? Be open to the possibility of magic because so many of us are walking with it but you wouldn’t know that because it lacks instantaneous familiarity.”

BLACK: “I’m often most hype about narratives that deal with intra-communal conflict removed from whiteness. I wanted to build a fictional world loosely based on Freedom, Georgia that explores the real struggles that exist between cishet folks & LGBTQ+ folks in the fight for Black liberation.”

Several writers commented that too many stories about trans people lack an understanding of the intersectionality of marginalized identities that many trans people deal with everyday.

BLACK: “Because of all my marginalized intersections I am often made invisible. Most people just see me as woman lite. Just assume my name has some allegiance to femininity, when NOVA literally means ‘new’ and ‘star.’ Many people still use her/she pronouns when addressing me, even on Zoom when dey/dem is clearly displayed in my little box.”

Levinson: “Nearly all of my work features the blend of transness and Jewishness. People are often surprised to learn that in my life, I have often felt more marginalized by the latter. And my transness interplays with my Jewishness in surprising and often unrepresented ways. This is what I’m passionate about showing people.”

Unfortunately, rather than centering the nuance of trans experiences, the narratives that are created in Hollywood often center cisgender perspectives on our lives. This results in tropes that we see played out again and again.

Zeke Smith, writer of  Wasps!  said, “I think the trope of ‘trans person looks in a mirror and hates their body’ reflects a very shallow knowledge of what it is to be trans. Not all of us hate our bodies.”

Valdez added that she’s tired of seeing “self-induced harm and mutilation.” “Filmmakers outside of our community have perceived this idea to be ‘provocative’ and ‘thrilling’ and they want to be the one to explore it and obsess over it.”

We asked these seven writers, how can Hollywood do better at telling transgender stories?

Smith: “Most importantly, we need these stories told by trans people. Even with the rise in the number of trans characters on television, trans people remain glaringly absent from writers’ rooms.”

Levinson: “Hollywood is in a bit of a self-perpetuating loop. Those with the power to green-light projects, or fund them, are nearly 100% cisgender people. Naturally, they fund and support storytelling which affirms and uplifts the same tropes that satisfy their cisgender curiosity about trans people.”

Rodgers: “There’s a ton of lip service paid to all marginalized communities. ‘Oh, we love your story, but let’s get someone else to direct it with name recognition. Maybe next time.’ … If we as trans people are greenlighting each other and building community together, we don’t have to wait for someone to give us permission. If we’re making the movies of our dreams independently, people will take notice and they’ll want to get in on it.”

Garrison: “I think we get more trans, non-binary and gender non-confirming folks into the development and executive studio/network pipeline — folks who share a lived experience and perspective. Also, true allies in those positions as well – those who use the word  ally  as a verb to champion, empower and trust us to tell our stories. To both of those points, I see it slowly happening, so I have hope!”

Salma: “Give the underdogs a fighting chance. Because so many Americans and people in the world still don’t know that many trans folks in their personal life, at least in an intimate meaningful way, it sometimes reflects in how the works of trans writers are being read.”

And as far as building a deep bench of talent, Valdez also reminded everyone that, “we also don’t need to only work on trans-related projects. We are highly capable of telling stories outside of our own personal narratives.”

In fact, two of the trans writers featured in this piece had scripts selected for the GLAAD List that did not center explicitly trans characters. GLAAD hopes that this will help Hollywood decision makers understand that trans people can tell all kinds of stories – and in fact may bring a unique and compelling perspective to stories that aren’t explicitly about transgender characters.

Each of these writers represent the immense trans talent that exists out there if one only chooses to look. We hope that production companies will look at the scripts from these writers (and at all of the scripts on the 2022 GLAAD List), to discover the compelling stories they have to tell and the perspective they can bring to any project.

NOVA CYPRESS BLACK  (dey/dem/they/them) is a Black trans non-binary queer collage of Midwest tranquility, Southern hospitality, & East Coast grit. Dey are currently a Staff Writer on season 3 of  The L Word: Generation Q .

Jett Garrison  (he/him) is an award-winning, transgender writer/director whose work has shown in over 100 film festivals worldwide. Jett’s known for directing the digital series  These Thems  and was recently staffed as a writer on The CW’s reboot of  4400 . He’s won an Emmy and been nominated for an Oscar for his short film work.

Dana Aliya Levinson  (they/she) is an actor ( American Gods ,  The Good Fight ,  Adam ), filmmaker, television staff writer, theater writer, and native New York Jewess. She was a Dramatists Guild Fellow and her theatrical work has been performed from San Francisco to Paris. As an actor, they can next be seen in the Russo Brothers’  The Gray Man , starring Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling. Their short film  FRAUD , based on their pilot of the same name, will screen in competition at the Tribeca Film Festival this summer.

Sav Rodgers  (he/him) is the director/producer of  Chasing Chasing Amy , an upcoming feature documentary about the controversy and impact of Kevin Smith’s  Chasing Amy  among LGBTQ+ people. Sav is an alumnus of the Outfest Screenwriting Lab, the PGA Create program, the TED Residency, and the Telluride Student Symposium. His short films have screened at top festivals, including Slamdance. Sav is the Founder of the Transgender Film Center, a nonprofit that helps trans creators bring finished films to audiences worldwide.

Noni Salma  (she/her) is an Award-winning screenwriter and Filmmaker whose growing up experiences in the colorful city of Lagos, Nigeria has inspired her eclectic storytelling. She is passionate about decolonizing narratives of black and brown trans, queer folks by centering them in her writing in ways that are fresh, inspiring and kicking.

Zeke Smith  (he/him) is a writer and comedian originally from Oklahoma; he’s best known from his time on  Survivor , but will tell you his best days were doing improv at UCB in New York (rest in peace). He currently lives in Studio City with his devastatingly handsome fiancé, Nico Santos. Zeke enjoys cooking, skiing, and searching for someone to pay for his ostentatious wedding.

Rain Valdez  (she/her) is an actor, writer and producer, who made history as the first Filipino-American transgender woman to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy in an acting category for her lead role in  Razor Tongue . Rain is the founder of ActNOW, the only LGBTQ acting class in Los Angeles. And she is the Trailblazer Award recipient at the 2021 Outfest Legacy Awards.

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Passing Thru Travel

15 Transgender Actors Revolutionizing Hollywood for the American Traveler

Posted: May 3, 2024 | Last updated: May 3, 2024

In a landscape craving authenticity and diversity, transgender actors are making their mark on Hollywood. Through their talent and courage, they’re not only challenging norms but also facing backlash with grace, turning it into an opportunity for dialogue and education. Here are 15 transgender actors who are reshaping how the world sees gender and identity in the media.

1. Laverne Cox

Image Credit: Shutterstock / a katz

Known for her role in “Orange Is the New Black,” Laverne Cox became the first openly transgender person to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. While she’s faced criticism and transphobia, Cox uses her platform to advocate for transgender rights, turning negativity into powerful conversations about acceptance and equality.

2. Elliot Page

Image Credit: Shutterstock / lev radin

Elliot Page, acclaimed for his roles in “Juno” and “The Umbrella Academy,” came out as transgender in December 2020, receiving widespread support for his bravery. Despite facing online harassment, Page continues to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, using his high profile to highlight issues facing the trans community.

3. Indya Moore

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Ron Adar

As one of the stars of “Pose,” Indya Moore has brought visibility to trans people of color. Their portrayal of Angel has been met with critical acclaim, though they’ve encountered transphobia and exclusion. Moore leverages their experiences to speak out against violence and discrimination, becoming a powerful voice for change.

4. Hunter Schafer

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Fred Duval

Before her acting debut in “Euphoria,” Hunter Schafer was an activist challenging bathroom bills in North Carolina. Schafer’s role as Jules has been praised for its nuanced depiction of a transgender teen’s life. Despite facing personal and public challenges, she continues to inspire and advocate for transgender youth.

5. Daniela Vega

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Cineberg

Chilean actress Daniela Vega starred in “A Fantastic Woman,” which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, making her the first openly transgender presenter in Academy Awards history. Vega’s performance and advocacy have opened doors for more inclusive representation, despite facing societal prejudice in her home country and abroad.

6. Brian Michael Smith

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Ga Fullner

Known for his role on “9-1-1: Lone Star,” Brian Michael Smith is one of the first openly transgender actors to play a trans character on network television. While embracing his identity has led to positive change and visibility, Smith acknowledges the ongoing struggle against discrimination in and out of the industry.

7. Alexandra Billings

With a career spanning decades, Alexandra Billings from “Transparent” has been a pioneering transgender actress and activist. Despite early challenges in finding roles that weren’t demeaning or stereotypical, Billings has seen a shift toward more authentic representations, though she emphasizes the battle is far from over.

8. Isis King

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Kathy Hutchins

Isis King gained attention on “America’s Next Top Model” before moving into acting with roles in “When They See Us.” As one of the first openly transgender people on reality TV, King faced public scrutiny but has used her platform to advocate for transgender rights and inclusion.

9. Jamie Clayton

Image Credit: Shutterstock / DFree

Jamie Clayton’s performance in “Sense8” was hailed for its groundbreaking portrayal of a transgender character’s life and relationships. Clayton has spoken out against Hollywood’s casting practices and the need for authentic transgender representation, challenging the industry to evolve.

10. Jen Richards

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Featureflash Photo Agency

Jen Richards, co-writer and star of the web series “Her Story,” has used her visibility to challenge stereotypes and push for more nuanced transgender narratives. Facing both support and backlash, Richards emphasizes the importance of trans stories told by trans people.

11. Amiyah Scott

Amiyah Scott made history as the first transgender woman to star in “Real Housewives of Atlanta” and “Star.” Scott’s journey has been met with both acclaim and adversity, highlighting the challenges and triumphs of being a transgender actress in today’s media landscape.

12. MJ Rodriguez

MJ Rodriguez’s role in “Pose” has been groundbreaking, earning her critical acclaim and a Golden Globe nomination. While Rodriguez has faced discrimination, her success marks a significant step forward for transgender actors of color in leading roles.

13. Chella Man

Image Credit: Shutterstock / rigsbyphoto

Chella Man, known for his role in “Titans,” has been open about his deafness and transgender identity, using his platform to advocate for accessibility and LGBTQ+ rights. His work challenges both audibility and gender norms, promoting inclusivity in media.

14. Zackary Drucker

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Ovidiu Hrubaru

Zackary Drucker, a producer and actress on “Transparent,” has utilized her work to explore the intersections of gender, sexuality, and identity, pushing back against transphobic attitudes while championing the need for more trans stories in entertainment.

15. Angelica Ross

Image Credit: Shutterstock / DCStockPhotography

Angelica Ross’s performances in “Pose” and “American Horror Story” have made her a prominent figure in transgender representation on screen. Ross has navigated both support and backlash with resilience, using her influence to address issues of race

Empowering Change

Image Credit: Shutterstock / Studio Romantic

Through their talent, resilience, and activism, these 15 transgender actors are not just redefining roles; they’re reshaping the entire landscape of Hollywood.

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The post 15 Transgender Actors Revolutionizing Hollywood for the American Traveler republished on Passing Thru with permission from The Green Voyage .

Featured Image Credit: Shutterstock / DFree.

For transparency, this content was partly developed with AI assistance and carefully curated by an experienced editor to be informative and ensure accuracy.

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Inside the Literary Travel Boom

Book butlers! Curated libraries! Custom cruises! Literary-themed vacations are the hot new trend in tourism.

In January, when packing my bags for a “reading retreat” in the Dominican Republic, I agonized about which books to bring. A few days later, bellied up to the beachside bar at the all-inclusive Dreams Macao Beach Punta Cana resort (where, in place of barstools, swings are suspended from the thatched ceiling), I sipped a mojito, cracked open James Salter’s Light Years, a novel I reread annually, and knew that I’d chosen well.

But if I’d had any regrets, summoning a new paperback would’ve been as easy as ringing for a book butler. I was down in the DR to experience Pages in Paradise, a collaboration between the publisher Penguin Random House, Belletrist Book Club (the brainchild of actress Emma Roberts), and Apple Vacations (no relation to the iPhone maker). For readers who like to beach, the retreat left no page unturned. The programming kicked off even before check-in: Ahead of arrival, guests could log in to the resort’s app to reserve beach reads from an on-site library curated by Belletrist. Housed in the airy hotel lobby, the collection included buzzy contemporary fiction by the likes of Zadie Smith and Curtis Sittenfeld. Guests could also order books via room service (or personal butler) anytime or select one from the chic library carts located at the adults-only pool. The property’s various bars featured the “Pages Pour,” a specialty cocktail themed to the program’s inaugural book-of-the-month selection, Jenny Xie’s debut novel, Holding Pattern . They called the drink a gin-fashioned—a fruit-forward riff on the old-fashioned, zippy with pineapple-cinnamon syrup.

Exotic as this tropical gathering of book lovers might have been, it’s just one example of a fast-growing business trend: literary-themed travel. We have the pandemic to thank. Reading surged in the early days of Covid, and the habit stuck as lockdowns eased: The biggest two years on record for print book sales in the U.S. were 2021 and 2022. Hotels and tourism companies, eager to lure back travelers, seized on the surge and began featuring books in their marketing. What began as a travel perk has become a full-blown movement to cater to readers with an explosion of new programming, from big-ticket experiences promising author access to solitary retreats. I know, I know—planning a trip around your reading list may never replace your annual golf weekend, but when else will you get the time to actually enjoy that stack on your nightstand? And if it all sounds like giving yourself homework, don’t worry—there definitely won’t be a quiz, and did I mention the drinks?

As a professional book recommender, the question I’m asked most often is “What book should I bring on my vacation?” ​But now there’s a new question to consider: What kind of literary vacation should I plan?

Not every reader is content to lie by the pool and read for days on end. Some are looking for a more kinetic experience—one that lets them interact with fellow readers, and even their favorite writers. Enter the “ Gone Girl cruise.” In fall 2022, author Gillian Flynn set sail down the Danube with some of her biggest (and most well-heeled) fans as part of Avalon Waterways’ Storyteller Series, cruises that offer literary travelers a chance to voyage in close quarters with authors and other storytellers. When Flynn tweeted about the cruise, it quickly became a viral sensation. On-board accounts detailed a true-crime extravaganza, with guests returning to their rooms each night to discover blood-spattered notes, themed to Flynn’s novels, on their pillows. Sure, it’s a little dorky—but we’re all fans of something, and if crime novels are your thing, what could be better?

For readers who can’t splash out for getaways abroad, there are literary destinations closer to home, too. In the artsy hamlet of New Hope, Pennsylvania, the historic luxury hotel River House at Odette’s offers Riverside Reading (in partnership with Bedside Reading), a program that pairs complimentary access to a curated library (via digital app or hard copies throughout the hotel) with intimate author experiences. With bookshelves stationed on each floor and authors rolling through seasonally, guests can dip in and out of the programming as they please.

When I visited River House deep in the grips of a harsh Pennsylvania winter, I discovered a reader’s paradise: My room boasted a fireplace, a private balcony, and serene views of the rushing Delaware River. After turndown service, I found a keepsake leather bookmark on my pillow. That evening, a few dozen guests gathered for a talkback with the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz. In a ballroom festooned with red carnations (a nod to the cover of her latest book, The Latecomers ), Korelitz fielded rapid-fire questions about her inspiration, her writing process, and her hit novel The Plot . After the formal conversation concluded, starstruck guests crowded around her at the bar. “When people come up to you and say, ‘I loved your book,’ that really means something to writers,” Korelitz told me. As the owner of BookTheWriter, a service connecting authors and readers through pop-up book clubs hosted in New York City apartments, Korelitz knows a thing or two about making connections. In the recent boom of literary travel experiences, she sees a broader post-pandemic trend of readers craving the chance to get up close and personal with their favorite writers. “The ways of access to authors have multiplied exponentially,” she said. “I find it to be very inspiring.”

For an early-career author like Xie, who was at Pages in Paradise, seeing her novel highlighted was both exciting and transformative. That’s the thing about literary travel—it allows us to transcend our ordinary lives in more ways than one. “There’s a certain sense that we don’t have the space to read unless we’re traveling or living outside of our day-to-day,” said Xie. “A book takes you outside of your physical environment and your lived experience. Travel does that, too, so they join together in this really beautiful way to truly transport you.” That’s a journey worth taking.

HOW TO PLAN YOUR OWN LITERARY VACATION

Ready to take off on a bookish getaway? Literary travel isn’t “one size fits all,” so whatever type of reader you are, we’ve got a prescription for it. Choose your own adventure below.

For the fan

The Gone Girl cruise is over, but Avalon Waterways isn’t slowing down anytime soon: Its upcoming slate of Storyteller Cruises includes actor Graham McTavish (sailing down the Rhine River) and Outlander phenom Diana Gabaldon (voyaging down the Danube).

For the R&R chaser

Looking for a more relaxed experience? At the Reeds at Shelter Haven, an upscale resort on the Jersey shore, guests can participate in Reeds’ Reads, a seasonal book club featuring guided discussions, with authors sometimes joining via Zoom for Q&A sessions.

For the aspiring writer

Chances are, your favorite author is side-hustling by leading retreats in pastoral Europe. To get in on the action, pay close attention to their social-media feeds, or search for guided trips through an experiential-tourism outlet like TrovaTrip.

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