[6] She was the only journalist to accompany the expedition, climbing with the team to a camp at 22,000 feet, and using a prearranged code to send news of the successful ascent, which was announced in The Times on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation (2 June 1953).
[7][5] Morris was born in Clevedon, Somerset, England, the youngest of three children of Walter Henry Morris (died 1938), an engineer from Monmouth, on the borders of Wales, who never fully recovered after being gassed in the First World War, and Enid (née Payne; died 1981), an English church organist who trained as a concert pianist at the Leipzig Conservatory[8][9][5] and was a "well-known recitalist in the early days of broadcasting in south Wales and the west of England".
[10][3] Her elder brothers Gareth (1920–2007) and Christopher (1922–2014) achieved distinction, as a flautist and as an organist and music publisher for the Oxford University Press respectively.
[19][5] The message was initially interpreted to mean that Tom Bourdillon and Tenzing had reached the summit, but the first name was corrected before the story was broken.
[23] In 1949, Morris married Elizabeth, daughter of Ceylon tea planter Austen Cecil Tuckniss;[17] they had five children together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys.
[31] "Out of polite respect" she accepted her appointment as Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1999 Birthday Honours for services to literature,[32] but Morris was a Welsh nationalist republican at heart.
[37] Morris's 1974 best-selling memoir Conundrum documented her transition and was compared to that of transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen (A Personal Autobiography).
[5][39] In an interview with the BBC in 2016, she told Michael Palin that she did not like to be described as a travel writer, for her books were not about movement and journeys; they were about places and people.
[40] Morris's 1985 novel Last Letters from Hav, an "imagined travelogue and political thriller" was shortlisted for that year's Booker Prize.