John David Morley

Morley published one collection of journalism and ten works of fiction, of which the last, Ella Morris, appeared in September 2014. Morley's papers are collected at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. He died on Sunday, 18 February 2018, aged 70.

Described in a 2005 profile in The Observer magazine as a man defined "by his compulsion to ride his adrenaline", Morley, on several occasions, came close to death while discovering his fiction. Indeed, when asked by The Observer's reporter "if he started out with nine lives, how many does he think he has left?", Morley answered: "Four". His numerous close calls included a 1973 skiing accident (in which he broke both legs, suffered an embolism and was on life-support for a week), a 1995 bout of malaria tropica in Burma and Thailand, a near-drowning in a local lake in Munich in 2001 on account of a stenosis of the aorta, and two subsequent experiences of open heart surgery, the latter an emergency operation conducted by a doctor who declared his patient to be "a medical miracle". "When I sit down and get seriously into a book, my pulse rate rises considerably," Morley once said. "You cannot live a safe life and an interesting one in this profession. Writing is a frightening business."

At three, Morley experienced a formative culture shock upon the family's relocation from tropical Malaya to England, before spending two years on Africa's Gold Coast where his father was helping to administrate the transition from British colonial rule in soon-to-be independent Ghana. Parts of the story of his early life are told in his father's book Colonial Postscript (1992). Educated at St George's School, Windsor, and Clifton College, Morley graduated from Merton College, Oxford, with a degree in English Language and Literature in 1969. Later the same year he left England for Munich, Germany.

In a 1987 profile in The Guardian, on the publication of The Case of Thomas N., Hugh Hebert singled out the identity issue. "Thomas N. never uses the word 'I', and that disappearance of the personal pronoun is also an important thread in Morley's essay on the Japanese language," Hebert noted of a theme common to Morley's first three books. "In the Japanese book, Morley wrote in the third person, calling his young Englishman Boon. In the Labyrinth suddenly, a third of the way through, turned into a first person narrative – Morley went back and wrote it all as 'I'. Thomas N. is a youth without qualities, a large zero in which the people around can write their own ideas."

From 1979-2000 Morley worked as a researcher and interpreter for the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), as a freelance journalist for publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Times, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Observer and Condé Nast Traveler, and as a correspondent for the short-lived Asia Times. During the 1990s, he wrote op-ed pieces in German for the feuilleton of the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

In 1973, Morley was awarded a three-year scholarship by the Japanese Ministry of Culture to study at the Language Research Institute of Waseda University in Tokyo. His stay in Japan would form the basis of his first published book, the fictionalised memoir Pictures from the Water Trade. A New York Times Book Review notable book which also featured in Time Magazine's list of the "Best of '85", the novel was translated into half a dozen languages and became a bestseller in Japan.

While working as a stage-hand at Munich's Kammerspiele in 1969, Morley received a call from a family friend, Nevill Coghill, asking whether he wished to spend the coming months at the Puerto Vallarta, Mexico residence of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, as tutor to Taylor's son Christopher Wilding. Morley would later recount his friendship with Burton and Taylor in a tribute published in Vanity Fair in December 1984, the year that Burton died.

John David Morley (21 January 1948 – 18 February 2018) was an English writer and novelist.