Author Bio
• Birth—1943
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Sorbonne, Paris; B.A., University of East Anglia
• Awards—James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Prix Fémina
Etranger, Whitbread Award, Orange Prize
• Currently—lives in East Anglia, UK
Rose Tremain was born Rosemary Jane Thomson in 1943 in London, the daughter of Viola (known as Jane) and Keith Thomson, a playwright.
She went to boarding school at Crofton Grange in Hertfordshire, an experience of which she later said in a Guardian interview, "It had all the horrors of boarding school— it was very cold and the food was disgusting. But the good thing about being sent away to school is that there’s a lot of what I would call dead time. You had to really use your own resources and what some of us did was to write our own plays and put them on. We starred in them, made the costumes, made the scenery, and it was thrilling."
After school she studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and then graduated with a degree in English from the University of East Anglia, where she later taught creative writing from 1988-1995.
She married Jon Tremain in 1971 and in 1972 had a daughter, Eleanor. Her second marriage was to the theatre director Jonathan Dudley. She now lives in East Anglia with the writer and biographer Richard Holmes.
Her first novel, Sadler’s Birthday, was published in 1976, and picked up by the editor Penelope Hoare, who later said, "I remember feeling utterly thrilled when I read it.... It was so unlike most people’s first novels, in the sense that it didn’t seem to be in the least bit autobiographical." Hoare has been Tremain’s editor ever since, working together on ten novels and several short story collections.
In the course of her writing career, Tremain has garnered a host of prizes, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and the prestigious Prix Fémina Etranger, the Whitbread Novel Award, and several others. She has been nominated for the Booker and Orange Prize several times. She won the Orange Prize in 2008 for The Road Home. (Author bio from Chatto & Windus, a division of Random House, UK.)