Julie Wheelwright talks with “writer and painter” Roma Tearne about “the arts of memory and survival.”
“At the launch for Bone China, Tearne says she tackled the issue of autobiographical elements in her novel head-on: ‘The story of the De Silva family evolved from traces of real incidents and real events.’ Her parents' ‘terrible sense of loss stayed with them until they died’. They never returned to Sri Lanka, and the civil war was played out in microcosm between their families. Her Tamil father was a poet who wrote for a local newspaper on which her mother, a Sinhalese, was a journalist. They secretly corresponded for years, knowing that because of their religious and ethnic differences a relationship was forbidden.” – from “Roma Tearne: the Enemy Within,” by Julie Wheelwright, The Independent