Julie Burchill Bio

Julie Burchill was born in Bristol and educated at Brislington Comprehensive School. Her father was a Communist union activist who worked in a distillery, and her mother worked in a cardboard box factory. Those origins matter, and she’s never let anyone forget them, the working-class Bristol voice, blunt and funny and combative, has run through every column, book and broadside she’s ever produced.

She started writing at the New Musical Express in 1976, aged 17, after answering, coincidentally alongside her future husband Tony Parsons, an advert in that paper looking for “hip young gunslingers” to write about the then-emerging punk movement. She landed the job by submitting a eulogy of Patti Smith’s 1975 debut album Horses, which the NME’s editors found arresting enough to hire her on the spot. She left the A-levels she’d started only a few weeks earlier to take it, and she’s never appeared to regret the trade.

After the NME, her main employers were The Face and The Sunday Times, where she wrote about politics, pop, fashion and society, and where she also worked as film critic from 1984 to 1986. By then she’d already co-written her first book: The Boy Looked at Johnny, published in 1978 with Tony Parsons, a polemical farewell to rock and roll that announced the Burchill persona in full, opinionated, gleefully contrarian, and entirely without caution.

The 1980s brought further collections of journalism and cultural commentary. With her then-husband Cosmo Landesman and Toby Young, she co-founded The Modern Review in 1991, a magazine that set out to bring serious critical attention to low-brow culture, tabloid television, pop music, pulp fiction, at a moment when the literary press largely ignored that territory. It ran until 1995 and attracted a devoted readership, becoming one of the more genuinely interesting cultural experiments of that decade.

She was hired in 1998 to write a weekly column in The Guardian, which she kept up for five years until 2003. Those years produced some of her most widely read and disputed work. She’s described her own style as “the writing equivalent of screaming and throwing things,” and the columns of that period lived up to it. According to Will Self, “Burchill’s great talent as a journalist is to beautifully articulate the inarticulate sentiments and prejudices of her readers”, a remark that sits somewhere between tribute and indictment depending on who’s holding the newspaper.

Her first novel, Ambition, published in hardback in 1989, tells the story of Susan Street and her efforts to become a newspaper editor, during which a press magnate sets her a series of escalating tasks. Journalist and author Sarra Manning later picked it for a list of the ten best “dirty books” published in Red Magazine. Two further novels followed: No Exit in 1993 and Married Alive in 1999, though it’s arguably her fiction for younger readers that has left the most lasting mark on her reputation.

Sugar Rush, published in 2004 and later adapted into a British television teen comedy-drama broadcast by Channel 4, centres on the life of 15-year-old Kim Daniels, who’s moved from London to Brighton on the south coast of England. Throughout the series, Kim copes with her dysfunctional family, her burgeoning sexuality, and her infatuation with Sugar, a heterosexual girl. The Channel 4 adaptation won the 34th International Emmy Award in the Children and Young People category on 20 November 2006, and the same series won the Stonewall Award for Broadcast of the Year in 2006. The sequel novel, Sweet, followed in 2007.

Her non-fiction covers an unusually wide range of subjects. Diana, published in 1998, was a study of Princess Diana written in the immediate aftermath of her death in Paris in August 1997. On Beckham, published in 2001, tracks David Beckham’s rapid rise from the most vilified man in Britain, following his red card at the 1998 FIFA World Cup, to a figure of genuine national affection. In Damaged Gods: Cults and Heroes Reappraised, published in 1986, she turns her critical attention to the twentieth century’s most compelling public mythologies and the figures who came to dominate the popular imagination.

Julie Burchill has been a published writer since she was seventeen, with a career across roughly twenty books, a number-one bestselling novel in Ambition, and an International Emmy for the television adaptation of Sugar Rush. Her play People Like Us enjoyed a sold-out run on the London fringe in 2018.

Her most recent book is Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, published in 2021. In 2013, she wrote a newspaper column defending a friend against political extremists; she was then denounced in Parliament and spent several years without a regular publishing platform. Academica Press became the third publisher to take on the book, which combines memoir with cultural polemic. Part personal account of that episode and part wider analysis of identity politics, it makes a case for a progressive politics rooted in shared humanity rather than the language of villainy and victimhood. Raised in a Communist household and a lifelong Labour voter, she argues for a politics that can hold those commitments together.

Through all of it, the music journalism, the feminist columns, the novels, the polemics, her voice has stayed consistent. Writing that John Arlidge described in The Observer in 2002 as “outrageously outspoken” and “usually offensive” has, on occasion, drawn legal action, and at no point has that prospect appeared to slow her down.

Julie Burchill Books

Novels

Non-Fiction (selected)