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Myers Literary Guide:
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The North-East
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JULIA DARLING (1956 - 2005) She was born in Winchester in the house where Jane Austen died, and attended school locally and at St Christopher’s in Letchworth. She chafed against authority from an early age, and supported the anti-apartheid movement and a woman’s right to choose. She came to Newcastle in 1980 as a community arts worker, fell in love with the city and determined never to leave. 'From the moment I arrived on the Quayside in 1980 I knew I would never live anywhere else, and that I had found my natural home.' Darling’s first novel was Crocodile Soup (1988), longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her love for the North East became a theme of her poetry, coupled, after her cancer diagnosis in 1994, with recording the progress of her disease and its impact on her life. In 2002, she won the Northern Rock literary prize, the largest award in the field. ‘Sudden Collapses in Public Places’ (2003) is a significant collection, and the same year saw her novel The Taxi-Driver’s Daughter longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her collection Apology for Absence was published in 2004, and she made a moving BBC documentary that year about coping with cancer. In 2005, she was poet in residence at Guardian Unlimited. Julia Darling held a Royal Literary Fund fellowship at Newcastle University, and then became a fellow in creative writing and health care. She also had her own lively website. She lived in Heaton with her two children and her partner Bev, and throughout her illness was active locally in arts projects and workshops linking health and poetry.
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