Julia Bell
Photo ©Domestika
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 work includes poetry, lyric essays and short stories published in The Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, The White Review, The New Statesman, and recorded for the BBC. I've published three novels with Macmillan/Simon & Schuster US and am co-editor of the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook (Macmillan). My essay Radical Attention returns in July 2026 with a new introduction by Grace Blakeley, and my new book Between the Lines will be 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 practise in my own work. On my Substack, I think 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 . . .”