The Writers of Wales Database

MORRIS, JAN

Tel: (via Faber & Faber) 02074 650045

Jan Morris was born in Somerset in 1926 to a Welsh father and an English mother. She received her B.A. in 1951 and her M.A. in 1961, both from Christ Church College, Oxford. Jan has written studies of Venice, Oxford, Manhattan, Sydney, Hong Kong, Spain and Wales. She is the author of the Pax Britannica trilogy about the British Empire, several autobiographical books, numerous volumes of collected travel essays and two novels, one of which, Last Letters from Hav, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1985. She has also edited the Oxford Book of Oxford and the travel writings of Virginia Woolf. Her latest title, Contact!: A Book of Glimpses (Faber & Faber, 2009), offers small insights into some of the people she has met during her decades of travels.

Jan is an Honorary D. Litt of the University of Wales, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of Academi, and a member of the Gorsedd of Bards. When she is not travelling she lives with her partner Elizabeth Morris in Llanystumdwy.

Reviews:
With respect to Hav (Faber & Faber, 2006)

"…Wherever Morris goes she brings a sharp, impassioned yet subtle eye and an inexhaustible love of adventure… there are few better ways to see the world than in her company..."
Ann Wroe, Daily Telegraph

"...It is a testament to Morris's skill and charm that one stays convinced for so long..."
Christina Koning, The Times


Selected Publications:
Coast to Coast (Faber, 1956)
The Market of Seleukia (Faber, 1957)
Sultan in Oman (Faber, 1957)
South African Winter (Faber, 1958)
Hashemite Kings (Faber, 1959)
Venice (Faber, 1960)
Coronation Everest (Faber, 1963)
Cities (Faber & Faber, 1963)
Oxford (Faber, 1965)
Spain (Oxford University Press, 1979)
A Venetian Bestiary (Thames and Hudson, 1982)
Manhattan '45 (Oxford University Press, 1987)
Sydney (Faber and Faber, 1992)
Compass Points (University of Wales Press, 1993)
Fisher’s Face (Viking, 1995)
Wales – Epic Views of a Small Country (Penguin, 2000)
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (Faber & Faber, 2001)
A Writer’s House in Wales (National Geographic Society, 2002)
Conundrum (Faber & Faber, 2002)
A Writer’s World: Travels 1950–2000 (Faber & Faber, 2003)
Pax Britannica (Trilogy): Heaven’s Command, Pax Britannica and Farewell the Trumpets (Faber & Faber, 2003)
Hav (Faber & Faber, 2006)
Contact!: A Book of Glimpses (Faber & Faber, 2009)



Hav (Faber & Faber, 2006)

When the world’s foremost travel writer describes the small city-state of Hav, it is unlike any of her other books. For Hav exists only in one special place - Jan Morris’s imagination.

Hav gives us Jan Morris at her most delightful and most suggestive. The city it describes is a magical place, but behind its arcane splendours are darker implications. The traditional Roof Race is peculiarly exciting, the waterfront is picturesque, the wistful call of a trumpeter from a distant rampart is wonderfully evocative, and every street corner is haunted by memories of illustrious visitors - Freud, Diaghilev, Marco Polo, Lawrence of Arabia and countless others. But Morris’s original visit to this prodigy, as recorded in the first part of this book, ends in flight when an unidentified enemy ravages the place.

When she returns some twenty years later, to write the second part of the book, she discovers a city-state that has rebuilt itself, transformed by new energies and now dominated by a totemic tower 2000 feet tall. But as the old Hav was in many ways an allegory of the last century, so the city in its new incarnation offers no less elusive hints, echoes and portents of our twenty-first century world. It remains a beguiling but disturbing enigma of the fancy...

To purchase this title from gwales.com, click on its front cover



Contact!: A Book of Glimpses (Faber & Faber, 2009)

In Contact!, Jan turns her brilliantly observant eye to the human contacts she made, across the globe and though the decades. As a series of vignettes, some only a few lines long, she records hundreds of brief glimpses and fleeting encounters, celebrating the people who helped spark her view of the world and mould her responses. A vast range of human experience is here: most are anonymous, everyday encounters - children playing, a homeless man in Manhattan, a lascivious taxi-driver - but she also remembers celebrated figures, from Yves San Laurent to King Hussein of Jordan, President Truman to Peter OToole. Contact! is a must for any fans of Jan's writing. Her great sense of amusement, shrewd eye for detail and huge enthusiasm for her contacts makes these episodes incredibly enjoyable - and often profound.

To purchase this title from amazon.co.uk, click on its front cover