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Dateline: 14th April, 2005
Julia Darling (1956 - 2005) Poet, novelist and playwright Julia Darling has died at the age of 48, after a long battle against breast cancer. Although probably best known for her Booker Prize-nominated novel The Taxi Driver's Daughter (2003), her first love was poetry and her illness provided her not only with a subject but also a cause. She believed passionately in the value of poetry: "Poetry should be part of every hospital, not just to keep patients amused," she once said. "The more descriptive language you can use about pain, the better you're going to communicate what's happening, and it means you can control it better." She ran workshops with GPs and hospital staff on using poetry to cope with illness, and produced a series of poems dealing with her own illness. One collection of these poems became a song cycle, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, with music by David Scott and Neil Blenkinsop, which was performed at Newcastle's Live Theatre last year. The singer in that show was Zoë Lambert for whom she had written the one-woman play Personal Belongings, performed in 2002 at Live and at the Edinburgh Fringe. Her other plays included Attachments (presented at Live as part of a double bill entitled Double Lives and which she adapted for television as Cold Calling, presented by Tyne Tees TV), another one-woman play, Fanny Cradock - The Life and Loves of a Kitchen Devil, and Eating the Elephant (1998), about four women who discover at the same time that they have breast cancer. She was a frequent broadcaster, with many of her poems, short stories and plays being produced by BBC radio. She was writer in residence at Live Theatre in 2002 and winner of the Northern Rock Foundation prize of £60,000 in 2003, as well as being poet in residence for the Guardian and a fellow in healthcare and literature in the English department at Newcastle University. Her most recent work for theatre, A Manifesto for a New City, for Northern Stage, is currently touring. She was unable to be present at the first night because she was too ill. As a memorial, Live Theatre is putting on a special performance of the show- the only performance in Newcastle - on Monday 18th April at 8 pm. Admission will be free but the theatre asks anyone wanting to attend to ring the box office on 0191 232 1232.
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