JULIA DARLING was a versatile, innovative and community-minded novelist, playwright and poet best known for her novels Crocodile Soup (1998) and The Taxi Driver’s Daughter (2003).

She was born in Winchester in 1956 and grew up in the house where Jane Austen died. Expelled from school several times, she left at 15, and, after studying performance at Falmouth School of Art, moved to Sunderland, where she worked in community arts. Before long she had set up Wig — the Women’s Intellectual Group — and a cabaret act called Sugar and Spikes with the writer Ellen Phethean. Darling and Phethean also founded a performance poetry group called the Poetry Virgins, whose inventive material later became the anthologies Modern Goddess (1992) and Sauce (1993).

In 1992 Darling and Phethean set up Diamond Twig to publish work by women writers from the North East.

Darling’s first collection of poems, Small Beauties, was published in 1988 by Newcastle upon Tyne City Libraries. Darling was really interested in writing novels, but, while engaged with other things, contented herself with short stories. Bloodlines, a collection bringing together strong women of all ages coping with difficult lives, was published in 1995. Her stories also appeared in collections including Northern Stories (1995) and Penguin Modern Women’s Fiction (1997) and were broadcast on Woman’s Hour.

Encouraged by publishers, Darling embarked on a novel. She and her husband Ieuan Einion had parted, and Darling took her daughters and her new female partner to Australia to write the book. Crocodile Soup, a novel about a museum curator preoccupied by her eccentric childhood and her love for a girl from the cafeteria, appeared in 1998, and was long-listed for the Orange prize.

A second novel, The Taxi Driver’s Daughter, which follows the lives of 15-year-old Caris and her family after her mother is imprisoned for stealing a shoe, appeared in 2003. For this Darling was awarded the Northern Rock Writers Award.

Darling wrote for a number of theatres including Quondam, Live Theatre and Northern Stage. Her plays include Doughnuts Like Fanny’s (2002), a comic play about the life of the TV cook Fanny Craddock, and Attachments, which featured a salesman and an anaesthetist. Manifesto for a New City, a musical inspired by her involvement in the Newcastle Gateshead European Capital of Culture bid, was completed in 2004. She also wrote numerous plays for radio, including The Black Path, written with Sean O’Brien for BBC Radio Three and set in the industrial past of the North East.

Darling was told in 1995 that she had breast cancer. When it returned, she decided that she would immerse herself in her work, and applied to do an MA in creative writing at Newcastle University, specialising in poetry. Afterwards she produced two well received collections, Sudden Collapses in Public Places (2003) and Apology for Absence (2004), both inspired by her experience of illness.

She was keen to promote poetry as a valuable means of dealing with illness. She worked with Alzheimer’s sufferers and their carers, and produced Tangles and Starbursts: Living with Dementia (2001). She edited an anthology of writing about illness with Cynthia Fuller, to be published on April 28; and her First Aid Kit for the Mind (an exhibition containing her poetry and paintings by Emma Holliday) opened on April 14.

Darling ran creative workshops on a number of subjects, and communicated with her readers via a weblog. She was interested in everybody.

She is survived by her partner, Bev Robinson, and by her two daughters.

Julia Darling, writer, was born on August 21, 1956. She died of cancer on April 13, 2005, aged 48.