Roma Tearne

Roma Tearne (née Chrysostom) is a Sri Lankan-born artist and writer. Her first novel, Mosquito, was shortlisted for the 2007 Costa Book Awards first Novel prize (formerly the Whitbread Prize).

Biography

Roma Chrysostom was born in 1954 in Sri Lanka, to a Tamil father and Sinhalese mother. Her father was a poet and her mother was a journalist, who regularly contributed to a newspaper column. They married in secret due to their different ethnic and religious backgrounds and were subsequently disowned by their respective families. In 1964 the family migrated to England, where she grew up in Brixton, attending the local comprehensive school. She then attended a teacher training college before marrying Barrie Bullen, an English professor at Reading University.

She trained as a painter, completing her MA at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford.

In 2002 she became the 'Leverhulme Artist in Residence' at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and whilst there, worked on "Happenings in a Museum".^[1]

In 2006 she was awarded an AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Fellowship, at Brookes University, Oxford and worked for three years in museums around Europe on a project accessing narrative within the collections.

Currently a Fellow at Oxford Brookes University,^[2] she has had many exhibitions, including "Nel Corpo delle cittá" at the prestigious MLAC ( Museo Laboratorio Arte Contemporanea ) in Rome.^[3]

Personal life

Tearne's husband is the writer J.B. 'Barrie' Bullen;^[4] together they have three children.

Bibliography

• Mosquito. Harper Collins. 5 March 2007. ISBN 0007233655. 
• Bone China. Harper Collins. 2008. ISBN 0007240732. 
• Brixton Beach. HarperPress. 2009. ISBN 9780007301560. 
• The Swimmer. 2010. ISBN 9780007301591.  (long-listed for the Orange Prize 2011.^[5])
• The Road to Urbino. Abacus. 2012. ISBN 9781408703922. 

External links

• Profile on Guardian Unlimited
• Roma Tearne website

References