Tuesday 16 May, 6.30pm
Serenita’ – Jan Morris’s Venice and Trieste
Jan Morris was a writer about places, described by Rebecca West as the greatest descriptive writer of her age. For the first forty-five years of her life, Jan was James, and as such was a famous international correspondent for the Times and the Guardian. Among his scoops were the story of the conquest of Everest in 1953, and the revelation of British and French meddling in Suez in 1956. In 1972, after years of hormone treatments, Jan underwent a gender reassignment operation in Casablanca. She then resumed her writing career, which included history, biography and fiction. By the end of her life she had travelled to and written about all of the chief cities of the world.
The first two foreign cities Jan went to, as a nineteen year-old soldier in 1946, were Venice and Trieste. Thus was born a lifelong love of these two cities, and her great books about them, Venice and Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. Derek Johns, who was Jan Morris’s literary agent for twenty years, and is the author of Ariel: A Literary Life of Jan Morris, and Professor John McCourt of Macerata University, who knew her in Trieste, will discuss the importance of these two cities in Jan’s writing and life.
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Derek Johns has been a bookseller, editor, publisher and literary agent. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has served as a trustee of English PEN and the Booker Prize Foundation. He was for twenty years Jan Morris’s literary agent, and is the author of Ariel: A Literary Life of Jan Morris.
John McCourt is Rector of the University of Macerata and professor of English literature. He is President of the International James Joyce Foundation. He is the author of many books and articles on James Joyce and on 19th and 20th century Irish literature including Consuming Joyce 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland (Bloomsbury 2022) and Writing the Frontier Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press).