Julia Darling

Julia Rose Darling (21 August 1956 – 13 April 2005) was an English novelist, poet and dramatist.

Early life and education Darling was born in 1956 at 8 College Street, Winchester—the house Jane Austen died in. Her parents were John Ramsay Darling, a science teacher at Winchester College and Patricia Rosemary, who was a nurse and a Quaker. 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 attended Winchester High School for Girls and St Christopher School. One of her friends at that time musician Robyn Hitchcock, described in her obituary as "groovy and alternative". She was expelled at 15 and attended Falmouth School of Art.

Writing career 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 Poetry Virgins".

Personal life and death On 13 October 1984 Darling married Ivan Paul Sears, a trade union organiser who later changed his name to Ieuan Einion. They had two daughters. In 1990, they divorced and Darling began living with Beverley Anne Robinson. 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.

Works

Plays Eating the Elephant and Other Plays (New Writing North, 2005).

Novels Crocodile Soup (Anchor Books, 1998), The Taxi Driver's Daughter (Viking, 2003), ; Penguin.

Poetry

Sudden Collapses in Public Places (Arc Publications, 2003). The Poetry Cure (Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2005). Apology for Absence (Arc Publications, 2005).

Short stories Bloodlines (Panurge Publishing, 1995). Pearl and other stories (MayFly Press, 2018).