Lisa St Aubin de Terán (born 2 October 1953) is an award-winning English novelist, writer of autobiographical fictions, and memoirist.
Lisa St Aubin de Terán was born in 1953 and brought up in Clapham in South London. She attended the James Allen's Girls' School. Her memoir, Hacienda (1998) describes how she abandoned her studies at the age of 17 for a disastrous first marriage to a sadistic Venezuelan landowner, Jaime Terán, living 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.[1]
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. She now lives in Mossuril, Nampula Province, Mozambique with her partner Mees van Deth, where she has set up the Terán Foundation. This phase of her life has been described in Mozambique Mysteries (2007).