Julia Bell
Photo Peter Clark
Writing, for me, is an act of attention - to language, to the world, to the lives we live inside and between the lines. I'm a writer and Professor of New Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, where I teach on the MA in Creative Writing.
My poetry, lyric essays and short stories have been published in The Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, The White Review, Prospect and the New Statesman, and broadcast on the BBC. I've published three novels with Macmillan and Simon & Schuster US, and I'm co-editor of the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook (Macmillan). My essay Radical Attention was reissued in 2026 with a new introduction by Grace Blakeley, and my most recent book, Between the Lines, was published by Simon & Schuster in May 2026.
I believe writing well takes courage, patience and commitment, qualities I try to nurture in my students and in my own work. My new online course, Attention Practices, takes these ideas beyond the workshop. The first session is free. On my Substack, I write about literature, culture and the art of paying attention. You can subscribe here.
“To write a good book you have to have certain qualities. Great art is connected with courage and truthfulness. There is a conception of truth, a lack of illusion, an ability to overcome selfish obsessions, which goes with good art, and the artist has got to have that particular sort of moral stamina. Good art, whatever its style, has qualities of hardness, firmness, realism, clarity, detachment, justice, truth. It is the work of a free, unfettered, uncorrupted imagination . . .”