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Lisa St Aubin de Terán (born 2 October 1953) is an English novelist, writer of autobiographical fictions, and memoirist. Her father was the Guyanese writer Jan Carew.
Biography
Lisa St Aubin de Terán was born in 1953 (to Joan Mary Murray and Jan Carew) and brought up in Clapham in South London. She attended James Allen's Girls' School. Her memoir, Hacienda (1998), describes how she fell into a whirlwind first marriage to an exiled Venezuelan landowner, Jaime Terán, and lived for seven years at a remote farm in the Andean region of Venezuela.
Her second husband was the Scottish poet and novelist George MacBeth. In 1982 she published her first novel, Keepers of the House, winning the Somerset Maugham Award and a place on Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists" list (1983, issue #7). The Slow Train to Milan, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, followed in 1983. In the same year she moved to Wiggenhall St. Mary Magdalen in Norfolk. After her second marriage ended she returned to live in Italy.
In 1994 she presented an episode of the BBC television series Great Railway Journeys.
Her third husband was the painter Robbie Duff Scott (born 1959), with whom she moved to Umbria, describing her life there in A Valley in Italy (1995).
Her work includes further novels and memoirs (including Memory Maps in 2003), short-story collections and poetry. Otto (Virago), a fictionalised biography, was published in 2006.
She has three children, including by her first husband a daughter, Iseult Teran, also a novelist. Although some sources state that St Aubin de Terán lives in Amsterdam, or that she divides her time between the Netherlands and Mozambique, others indicate that she now lives with her partner Mees van Deth in Mossuril, Nampula Province, Mozambique.
She has set up the Terán Foundation there. This phase of her life has been described in Mozambique Mysteries (2007). Terán Foundation's first project, The College of Tourism and Agriculture (CTCA) in Cabaceira Grande, functioned between 2004 and 2010 before it was sold back to the government. A second restaurant and guest house, Sunset Boulevard, functions on a non-profit basis as a training facility in Mossuril. The third building project, The Leopard Spot, is currently under construction in Milange, on the border with Malawi.