Lisa St Aubin de Terán

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 and academic Jan Carew.

Life and career Lisa St Aubin de Terán was born in 1953 to Joan Mary Murray (née St Aubin) and Jan Rynveld Carew and was 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 at the age of 16 to an exiled Venezuelan aristocrat and bank robber, Jaime Terán, She fled both the marriage and Venezuela when he suggested that she and their infant daughter should join him in a suicide pact.

After returning to Britain, she married her second husband, the Scottish poet and novelist George MacBeth in 1982. It was also in that year she published her first novel, Keepers of the House, winning her the Somerset Maugham Award and a place on Grantas list of "Best of Young British Novelists" (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 broke down, she left to live in Italy.

Her third husband was the painter Robbie Duff Scott, whom she had first met when George MacBeth asked him to paint a portrait of her. After marrying in 1989, she and Duff Scott moved to Umbria, her life there being described in Venice: The Four Seasons (1992) and A Valley in Italy (1994).

In 1994, she presented "Santos to Santa Cruz", an episode of the BBC television series Great Railway Journeys, about travelling from Brazil to Bolivia, and wrote an accompanying article for The Times. Later in 1998, she visited Lake Garda and Lake Maggiore for an episode of the BBC Radio 4 documentary The Off Season.

In 2001, Duff Scott and de Terán separated and by 2003 de Terán had moved to Amsterdam and set up her own film production company called Radiant Pictures, through which she met her new partner, Dutch cameraman, Mees van Deth. A year later, the couple moved to Mossuril, Nampula Province, Mozambique.

De Terán has three children.

The Terán Foundation In 2004, Lisa St Aubin de Terán established The Terán Foundation to help poor villages in northern Mozambique. She writes about this phase of her life in Mozambique Mysteries (2007).

The Terán Foundation's first project, the College of Tourism and Agriculture (CTCA) in Cabaceira Grande, operated 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, was earmarked for construction in Milange, on the border with Malawi.

Awards