The Tiger

Lisa St Aubin de Terán was born in London in 1953. She left England at the age of sixteen and, with her exiled Venezuelan husband, travelled extensively through Europe for two years before returning to his family home in the Andes. For seven years, she ran her husband’s sugar and avocado estate, drawing on these experiences in her first novel, Keepers of the House (1982) which won the Somerset Maugham Award.

In 1983 she was named one of twenty Best of Young British Novelists by Granta and won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize for her second novel Slow Train to Milan.

She later moved to Italy with her third husband, the painter Robbie Duff Scott, describing her experiences in Venice: The Four Seasons (1992) and A Valley in Italy (1994).

A prolific writer, over the past thirty years St Aubin de Terán has published further novels, including Joanna (1990), The Palace (1997) and Otto (2005); the short story collections The Marble Mountain and other stories (1989) and Southpaw (1999); and a volume of poetry, The High Place (1985). She has also edited two collections of women’s travel writing, Indiscreet Journeys (1989) and The Virago Book of Wanderlust and Dreams (1998) and an collection of imaginative writing on Italy, Elements of Italy (2001).

She currently divides her time between the Netherlands and Mozambique, where she runs the Terán Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation working in the underdeveloped villages in the north of the country. Her experiences are described in the memoir Mozambique Mysteries (2007).