Julia Darling

Background

Darling was born in 1956 in 8 College Street, Winchester—the house Jane Austen died in.

Education

She was expelled at 15 and attended Falmouth School of Artist

Career

Darling later wrote about how the house"s Austen connection meant they were constantly visited. She later wrote that as a teenager, she had put up anti-apartheid and pro-choice posters in her bedroom windows earning her a complaint from the Jane Austen Society. Darling went to school at Winchester High School for Girls and at Street Christopher School.

Darling moved to Newcastle in 1980 and began her writing career as a poet, publishing a collection entitled Small Beauties in 1988 and working with a performance group called "The Virgins".

In 1995 she published a book of short stories, Bloodlines with Panurge Press, and many of these stories were broadcast on British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4. In 1998 her first novel, Crocodile Soup, was published by Anchor at Transworld.

The novel went on to be published in Canada, Australia, Europe and the United States and was long-listed for the Orange Prize. She wrote many plays for stage and radio.

In 2003, Darling"s first full-length collection of poems, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, was published by Arc and was awarded a Book Society Recommendation.

She worked on a number of arts and health projects, including work with elderly people in residential homes for Equal Arts, and she ran drama workshops for doctors and patients with the project "Operating Theatre". On October 13, 1984 Darling married Ivan Paul Spears, a trade union organizer who would later change his name to Ieuan Einion. They had two daughters—Scarlet and Florence.

She was heavily involved in starting Proud Words, the first English lesbian and gay literary festival.

Darling died of breast cancer in 2005 aged 48.

Achievements

• Her second novel, The Taxi Driver"s Daughter, was published by Penguin and long-listed for the Main Booker Prize and short-listed for the Encore Award. She was a fellow of Literature and Health in the English School at Newcastle University and was a recipient of the prestigious Northern Rock Foundation Writer"s Award, the largest annual literary award in England.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Poetry Cure (Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry)

    (A collection of poetry concerning ill health and the issu...)

  • Sudden Collapses in Public Places

    (Includes poems about cancer that offer an insight into a ...)

  • Eating the Elephant and Other Plays by Julia Darling (2005-12-07)
  • Crocodile Soup: A Novel
  • Eating the Elephant and Other Plays by Julia Darling (2005-12-07)
  • Apology for Absence
  • Sudden Collapses in Public Places by Julia Darling (2003-10-01)
  • Eating the Elephant and Other Plays

Connections

teacher:

John Ramsay

Friend:

Robyn Hitchcock