As a small boy Nick remembered uninvited holidaymakers snooping around parts of his house, even his bedroom, and his contempt for the ravaging effects of unchecked, unregulated tourism, began.
Nick's aversion to empire, and the English ruling class, began at boarding school during the sixties, where he experienced sadistic institutionalized bullying, and extremely poor sanitary conditions.
He was accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but couldn't afford the fees, so instead trained as an actor at Rose Bruford College, Kent.
Prominent actors performed his work, including Tim Roth, Ralph Fiennes, Pete Postlethwaite, Frances Barber, Lesley Sharp, Geoffrey Hutchings, Phillip Jackson, and Antony O'Donnel.
[4] Having grown up in a secluded agricultural community similar to Laurie Lee, Nick was a natural fit to adapt Cider With Rosie for the stage, in 1981.
Nick wrote a Play for Today entitled Farmer's Arms (1983), a comedy western set in the parish of St. Merryn, near where he grew up, starring Phillip Jackson, Colin Welland, and Brenda Bruce.
[7] This followed in the footsteps of his father, conservationist 'Pop' Darke, who as St. Eval Parish Council Chairman before Nick, prevented a carpark from being built on the site of Porthcothan sand-dunes.
Nick is the father of film-maker Henry Darke and stepfather of Jim Roberts, a marine scientist who works for the prestigious NIWA environmental research institute of New Zealand.
The Art of Catching Lobsters, directed and filmed by Jane Darke, with additional camera-work by Molly Dineen, is a moving account of her husband's death, and the grieving process.
Peter Cheeseman, the Artistic Director of Victoria Theatre Stoke, was a huge influence on the early part of Nick's career, and the direction it would take.
Nick was personally and creatively fascinated by the individual's ability to entirely remake themselves anew, exploring the subject in three of his plays: The Body, The Bogus, and Kissing The Pope.
Later on, Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang, and Dessert Solitaire, were big influences on Nick's attitude to the natural world, and our collective responsibility towards it.
The biggest influences on Nick's life and work were the farmer's he grew up with as a boy, the fishermen he made friends with as a man, and the distinctly Cornish men and women in the parish of St. Eval, who once defined the area, but who he watched gradually and completely disappear from the community.
Subjects ranged from eco-sabotage, Greek mythology, child soldiers, U.S. geopolitics, Saint Paul, the right-wing lobbying arm of the evangelical Christian movement, domestic abuse, British colonialism, and slavery in Africa, but the bulk of Nick's work, reflected Cornish society and culture, such as tin mining, farming, and fishing.
Nick Darke's literary voice is highly distinctive and many of his characters, plots and settings are rooted in real Cornish life, past and present.
As one of his earliest reviews, in The Financial Times stated: "Darke gives shape to a Cornish identity that feels vital and real and has nothing to do with clay pipes and clotted cream".
Funded by the university, the annual award began as a financial prize aimed at giving writers time to write an entirely new work, in stage, screen or radio.