Ian Cochrane

Who was Ian Cochrane?

Ian Cochrane was a novelist and creative writing teacher. His novels are known for dark humour and tragic endings.

Cochrane was born in Ballymena and grew up in rural Antrim, in Northern Ireland. He said, "We lived in a little house right out in the country, with seven of us sleeping in one bedroom. But I don't think I realised we were living in poverty."

Later the family moved into one of the new council houses built after the Second World War, but Cochrane continued to attend the old two-roomed country school. This school had a female teacher at one end for the younger children and a male "master" at the other end for the older ones.

The master in this case was the progressive R.L. Russell and he encouraged young Cochrane to write and gave him the confidence to escape to better things.

Cochrane moved to London in the late 1950s and after abandoning a variety of jobs was eventually able to live as a full-time writer. Stories began to appear in literary magazines, and anthologies such as Faber's Introduction 4 and Penguin Modern Stories. Cochrane's first novel, A Streak of Madness, was published in 1973 and his second, Gone in the Head, was a runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize.