Jim Morgan was educated at St Peters College, Adelaide, where he won the Tennyson Medal for English Literature in 1946. He went on to study at Magdalen College, Oxford and was called to the Bar at the Middle Temple, London, in 1955.
Changing to the agricultural career which was to occupy a large part of his life, he worked as a jackaroo on Kangaroo Island and in the southeast of South Australia, farmed in various properties in western Victoria and was later director or CEO of pastoral holdings in the north and northeast of South Australia and New South Wales.
He gave up farming in 1990 and turned to journalism and writing novels, writing for the Age, the Melburnian, the Australian Book Review, Meanjin and the Australian. Morgan is the son of lawyer and writer, E. J. R. Morgan (q.v.).
