Lisa St. Aubin de Teran
Lisa St. Aubin de Terán was born Lisa Rynveld in South London. She attended the James Allen's Girls' School. She married a Venezuelan landowner, Jaime Terán in 1971, at the age of 17, and became a farmer of sugar cane, avocados, pears, and sheep from 1972-1978.
Her second husband was the Scottish poet and novelist George MacBeth. After the marriage failed, she married painter Robbie Duff Scott and moved to Umbria, Italy.
In 1982, St. Aubin de Terán published her first novel, Keepers of the House. This novel was the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award. Her second novel, The Slow Train to Milan, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She received the Eric Gregory for Poetry in 1983. Her work includes novels, memoirs, poetry, and short-story collections.
St. Aubin de Terán has three children, including a daughter by her first husband, Iseult Teran, who is also a novelist.
She currently lives in Amsterdam with her partner Mees Van Deth, where she runs a film company and has set up the Terán Foundation in Mozambique.
“Travelling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.”
“The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain.”
“My head was a desolate place and as barren as the bare hills of Le Marche. Until I began to build in it, only vultures nested there.”
“I knew, as every peasant does, that land can never be truly owned. We are the keepers of the soil, the curators of trees.”
“Fine food is poison. It can be as bitter as antimony and bitter almonds and as repulsive as swallowing live toads. Like the poison the emperor took every day to stop himself being poisoned, fine food must be taken daily until the system becomes immune to its ravages and the taste buds beaten and abused to the point where they not only accept but savour every vile concoction under the sun.”
“Like poetry, in times of intense emotion the image returns to me. Like poetry, it stroked my soul and, by turns, lulled and stoked my senses.”
“Their only chance to mix with royalty was while they played Bezique. They never played any other game but this one that had grown out of the French court: it was the game of the cavaliers, a game of waiting between battles.”
“Traveling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.”