Jan Morris, celebrated writer and transgender pioneer has died at the age of 94. Morris was revered for her journalism, histories, travel writings and her groundbreaking 1974 transition memoir, Conundrum.
She herself rejected the term “travel writer” saying her books were “about place, which [is] nothing to do with movement” and in writing about her transition she said: “To myself I had been a woman all along and I was not going to change the truth of me, only discard the falsity…but it seemed only natural to me, and I embarked upon it only with a sense of thankfulness, like a lost traveler finding the right road at last.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/20/jan-morris-obituary
Tributes and profiles:
A profile from earlier this year on the occasion of the publication of Thinking Again, an appreciation from the Los Angeles Times, a Literary Hub conversation from 2016, and a CBS profile from 2000. “Brain Pickings” also has an in-depth examination of Conundrum.
