Sarah Kane - Life

Life

Born in Brentwood, Essex, and raised by evangelical parents, Kane was a committed Christian in adolescence. Later, however, she rejected those beliefs. After attending Shenfield High School, she studied drama at Bristol University, graduating in 1992, and went on to take an MA course in playwriting at the University of Birmingham, led by the playwright David Edgar.

Kane struggled with severe depression for many years and was twice voluntarily admitted to the Maudsley Hospital in London. However, she wrote consistently, if slowly, throughout her adult life. For a year she was writer-in-residence for Paines Plough, a theatre company promoting new writing, where she actively encouraged other writers. Before that, she had worked briefly as literary associate for the Bush Theatre, London. Kane died in 1999, when, two days after taking an overdose of prescription drugs, she committed suicide by hanging herself by her shoelaces in a bathroom at London's King's College Hospital.

Read more about this topic:  Sarah Kane

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    In a period of a people’s life that bears the designation “transitional,” the task of a thinking individual, of a sincere citizen of his country, is to go forward, despite the dirt and difficulty of the path, to go forward without losing from view even for a moment those fundamental ideals on which the entire existence of the society to which he belongs is built.
    Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)

    Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life ... can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
    George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    Who shall describe the inexpressable tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be midwinter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)