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==