Sydney

Renowned and much-loved travel writer Jan Morris turns her eye to Sydney: 'not the best of the cities the British Empire created ... but the most hyperbolic, the youngest at heart, the shiniest.' Sydney takes us on the city's journey from penal colony to world-class metropolis, as lively and charming as the city it describes. With characteristic exuberance and sparkling prose, Jan Morris guides us through the history, people and geography of a fascinating and colourful city.

Jan Morris's collection of travel writing and reportage spans over five decades and includes such titles as Venice, Hong Kong, Spain, Manhattan '45,A Writer's World and the Pax Britannica Trilogy. Hav, her novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

'Sydney should be flattered. A great portrait painter has chosen it for her recent subject . . . Few writers - a handful of novelists apart - have got so far under the city's skin as Morris . . . Few Sydneysiders could match her knowledge of their city's history and its anecdotes' The Times

'The writing is, at times, like surfing: sentences rise like vast waves above which she rides, never overbalancing into gush . . . Jan Morris convincingly explains modern Sydney through its history' Observer



Jan Morris was born in 1926 of a Welsh father and an English mother, and when she is not travelling she lives with her partner Elizabeth Morris in the top left-hand corner of Wales, between the mountains and the sea. Her books include

Coronation Everest,

Venice,

The Pax Britannica Trilogy (

Heaven's Command,

Pax Britannica, and

Farewell the Trumpets), and

Conundrum. She is also the author of six books about cities and countries, two autobiographical books, several volumes of collected travel essays and, more recently, the unclassifiable

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere.

A Writer's World, a collection of her travel writing and reportage from over five decades, was published in 2003.

Hav, her novel, was published in a new and expanded form in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her most recent book,

Contact!, about the people she encountered on her many travels, was published in 2009.