"A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.""Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.""At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.""I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.""I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.""I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important.""I'm not very interested in charting a day-to-day familiar reality. I'm always looking for territory in which to explore the BIG subjects, the life-or-death stories.""Life is not a dress rehearsal.""Life should be embraced like a lover.""Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.""Perhaps, more importantly, I think that most human beings realise only a fraction of the true potential of their minds, so the spiritual or mystical, the things which remain mysterious or unexplained have always drawn me to include them in any scheme for a novel.""So history is fertile territory for me and I think I could feel happy with any period of history, provided I had the right sources and the necessary time for the initial research.""The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.""The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.""When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it."
Rose Tremain was born Rosemary Jane Thomson on August 2, 1943 in London and attended Crofton Grange School from 1954 to 1961; the Sorbonne from 1961—1962; and graduated from the University of East Anglia in 1965 where she then taught creative writing from 1988 to 1995.
She married Jon Tremain in 1971 and they had one daughter, Eleanor, born in 1972, who became an actress. The marriage lasted about five years. Her second marriage, to theatre director Jonathan Dudley, in 1982, lasted about nine years; and she has been with Richard Holmes since 1992. She lives in East Anglia.
Her influences include William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 1967 novel, 100 Years of Solitude and the magical realism style.
Her novel Music and Silence won the best novel in the 1999 Whitbread Awards, building on the recognition she received in the award of the 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year for her novel Restoration, and the 1992 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Sacred Country. Tremain also won the Prix Femina Étranger in 1994 for Sacred Country. She is an historical novelist who approaches her subjects "from unexpected angles, concentrating her attention on unglamorous outsiders." Costume dramatist | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books
Tremain has judged the Booker prize twice, first in 1988 and again in 2000. In June 2008 she won the Orange Prize for fiction, awarded to the best novel of the year written in English by a woman, for The Road Home, the story of an Eastern European immigrant in the UK. Tremain has also written for radio.
In 2009, she donated the short story The Jester of Astapovo to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the 'Earth' collection.
