Hymnal

Julia Bell is a writer and academic, she is the author of four novels, the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook (Macmillan) and the book-length essay Radical Attention (Peninsula Press). Her essays and short stories have been published nationally and internationally including in the TLS, the White Review and the Paris Review and broadcast on the BBC. Her poetry has been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Prize. She is a Reader in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London.

'Moving, tender writing with a haunting evocation of place and time.' - Hannah Lowe; 'These full-throated poems bring to resonant life the story of a daughter whose father's calling "sits on all our shoulders like a fog". Bewildered by severities at odds with her body, she wonders at Jonah breathing inside a whale while on land "I do not know which way is up ... The surface is so far down." Yet the desires of the queer self unfolding in thrilling detail here refuse to be extinguished - the phrasing in Hymnal glistens with the rich clarity of stained glass.' - John McCullough