Rose Tremain, born in London in 1943, was one of only five women writers to be included in Granta’s original list of 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 1983. Her novels and short stories have been published worldwide in 27 countries and have won many prizes, including the Sunday Express book of the Year Award (for Restoration, also shortlisted for the Booker Prize); the Prix Femina Etranger, France (for Sacred Country); the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award (for Music & Silence) and the Orange Prize for Fiction (for The Road Home). Restoration was filmed in 1995 and a stage version was produced in 2009.
Rose lives in Norfolk, England with the biographer, Richard Holmes. She is the mother of one daughter, Eleanor and has two grandchildren, Archie and Martha. She was made a CBE in 2007 and in 2013 was appointed Chancellor of the University of East Anglia.
I suspect that many writers deceive themselves about why they write. My self-deception is that I create in order to understand, and that the final end of it all may be wisdom. This means that I deliberately seek out the strange, the unfamiliar, even the unknowable as subjects for my fiction and trust my imagination to illuminate them to the point where both I and the reader can see them with new clarity.
Rose Tremain
