John David Morley

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

The third and youngest child of the artist and sculptor Patricia Morley (née Booth) and John Arthur Elwell Morley, a District Officer in the British Colonial Service, John David Victor Morley was born "in something of a hurry on a bench in a third-class Chinese ward at the Kandang Kerbau Maternity Hospital" in Singapore. He grew up speaking Malay amid an extended household of Malays, Javanese, Chinese and Indians, later commemorated by his parents in their memoirs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.