Read more
Drawing on Tearne's background, and experience of loss - she left Sri Lanka for the UK with her family, at the start of the civil unrest during the 1960s - the book imagines an archive and museum collection cultivated from a trunk of photographs and artefacts from an unknown donor. With no known provenance and in poor condition, the collection stands in as a substitute for the lost possessions of every dislocated individual - whether a displaced person or refugee, or simply someone who has been forced by circumstance to leave the familiar behind, losing special objects in the process. People often cannot help looking for artefacts which belong to their past, and are unable to rest if they can't find them. TRACe provides that rest - it is the story of a collection, and the house which becomes a museum to hold those possessions.
"On entering you will notice that the collection within these rooms appears to belong to one person alone. However, I hope that on closer inspection it will become clear that the exhibits belong to everyone who has ever lived."
About the author
Roma Tearne left Sri Lanka with her family, at the start of the civil unrest during the 1960s. She trained as a painter & filmmaker at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford and then was Leverhulme artist in residence at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Subsequently she was awarded an AHRC Fellowship and worked for three years in museums around Europe on a project accessing narrative within the collections.She has written seven novels. Her fifth, The Road To Urbino was published by Little Brown in June 2012 to coincide with the premier of her film of that name at the National Gallery in London. She has been short-listed for the Costa, the Kirimaya & LA Times book prize and long-listed for the Orange Prize in 2011 and, in 2012, the Asian Man Booker.
