David Rain 1961-2015 (1961-2015)

David Rain was a novelist whose work included The Heat of the Sun (2012), which tells the story of ‘Trouble’, the child of Madame Butterfly, and what happens to him after Puccini’s opera is over. He also wrote Volcano Street (2014), a comedy-drama set in Australia during the Vietnam War.

Under the name ‘Tom Arden’, David was the author of a million-word fantasy sequence in five volumes, The Okoron (1997–2001), a high-camp operatic saga set in a world based loosely on 18th-century Europe and Asia. As Tom Arden, David also published two small-press novels mixing gothic and science-fictional elements, Shadow Black (2002) and The Translation of Bastian Test (2005), as well as a Doctor Who novella, Nightdreamers (2002). He published poetry in magazines including PN Review and The Interpreter’s House. Other publications included the article ‘Literary Genres’ in the Edinburgh University Press Handbook of Creative Writing, as well as short stories and articles in magazines and journals including Interzone, the TLS, Critical Quarterly, English and English Studies.

David grew up in a small town in south Australia and was educated at the University of Adelaide, where he acquired a PhD in English literature for a dissertation on the 18th-century novelist Samuel Richardson. He lived in Britain and Ireland from 1990 and taught English literature at Queen’s University Belfast and creative writing at Middlesex University.