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One of Britain’s greatest and best-loved travel writers Jan Morris talks to poet and novelist Kevin Crossley-Holland about her life and work and receives the 2014 Honorary Fellowship of the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival. Morris is a historian, travel writer and novelist best known for her Pax Britannica trilogy on the history of the British Empire and for her travel writing on cities, most notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong and New York. She famously accompanied the first successful Everest expedition in 1953 and was first to report the triumph, before going on to write a series of acclaimed travel books.

Morris wrote and lived under the name James Morris in her early years before undergoing a change of sexual role in the early 1970s. Alongside her many travel books, she has also written a novel, Last Letters from Hav, and her trilogy on the history of the British Empire, Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress, Pax Britannica: The Climax of Empire, and Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat.

This event is the third in a series at which well-known poet and author Kevin Crossley-Holland speaks to an author of his choosing. Last year, he spoke to the late poet Seamus Heaney and there will be a third event in 2015. This event will also be marked by the awarding of the 2014 Honorary Fellowship of the Oxford Literary Festival to Jan Morris. The previous recipients have been Philip Pullman (2013), William Boyd (2012), Kazuo Ishiguro (2011), Dame Antonia Byatt (2010), and Baroness P D James (2009).

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