Diary of a London Call Girl Magnanti worked for 14 months as a £300-an-hour prostitute called Taro for a London
escort agency from 2003, after submitting her PhD
thesis. She had previously been a science blogger using her real name and started blogging about sex work under a pseudonym. Shortly after receiving the award she signed with literary agency
Conville and Walsh which negotiated a publishing deal with
Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Reviews of the books compared her writing to the works of
Martin Amis and
Nick Hornby, and she frequently quotes from the poems of
Philip Larkin. Themes of the blog and books include isolation and
personae. "Solitude as much as sex propels these books ... Belle's prickly disbelief in any lasting togetherness picks up an almost existential heft." She writes in
Playing the Game "it's not all about the sex – never has been – it's about the heart of darkness."
Later writing Magnanti's publisher,
Orion Books, printed her first two books as part of its "Non Fiction/Memoir" line. Her third book was classified as fiction and represents a fictional continuation from the first two. Her books have been published in the UK, US, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic, Romania, Russia, and China. In 2016 her first thriller
The Turning Tide was published in the UK. It attracted positive reviews, with
The Guardian listing it among the best recent crime novels and
The Times noting "Magnanti's writing is lively and entertaining. When her victims are laid out on that slab, her unspeakably detailed descriptions are good enough to put the wind up
Patricia Cornwell." From November 2005 until May 2006, Magnanti contributed a regular column in
The Sunday Telegraph. Since her identity had been revealed she has written about UK libel laws and their effect on science for
The Guardians website
Comment Is Free. On 25 February 2010 Magnanti appeared on the BBC political affairs programme
This Week to discuss the subject of
sex education. She is also an occasional guest on
The Book Show broadcast on
Sky Arts and has spoken at a number of venues including
The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival in conversation with
India Knight. She has also spoken on internet and forensic identity as part of the
Bristol Festival of Ideas and was a guest on the
Stephen Fry 2011 series ''Fry's Planet Word''. In 2012 Magnanti was selected as ambassador for the
Inverness Whisky Festival and was ambassador for the festival's gin section in 2015. Magnanti, along with
Tobias Hill, acted as a judge for
Fleeting Magazine's 2012 Six-Word Short Story Prize. She was interviewed on
Hardtalk on the BBC in October. Since 2012 she has been contributing blogger to
The Daily Telegraph.
Scientist Magnanti's PhD thesis, awarded from the
University of Sheffield Department of
Forensic Pathology, was entitled
Macrobioinformatics: the application of informatics methods to records of human remains. It was submitted in September 2003 and the degree was awarded in 2004. After moving to London and while blogging as
Belle de Jour she also worked as a computer programmer in
cheminformatics at
InforSense. She blogged about this career at Cosmas. Magnanti went on to work as a biostatistician in the
Newcastle University Paediatric and Lifecourse Epidemiology Research Group (PLERG), researching a possible link between the occurrence of thyroid cancer in under-25s in NE England and radioiodine fallout exposure from
Chernobyl in Ukraine. After her pseudonymous publishing career Magnanti was identified to be working as a research associate in developmental neurotoxicology and
cancer epidemiology at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health (BIRCH) at the University of Bristol. researching the policies for assessing the risks of developmental neuropathology from exposure to
organophosphates. She collaborated on several EU project policy documents regarding human developmental risks of environmental exposure to
chlorpyrifos,
phthalates, and
DecaBDE and
HBCD.
Activism In early 2012, Magnanti published a non-fiction popular science book under her real name entitled
The Sex Myth. It covered topics in sexuality studies and sociological research in the effects of adult entertainment and sex work. Reviewing for
The Observer Catherine Hakim wrote "Magnanti offers a pretty sharp analysis of sexual politics: who fabricates the myths and why, the role of both rightwing and leftwing media in building up
moral panics, the vast sums obtained by the pressure groups that profit from them, and, more recently, too, by the pharmaceutical companies that plan to profit from newly invented sexual diseases." It drew a less favourable review from
Julie Bindel, who writes of Magnanti's book, "I disagree with just about everything she has to say". In 2011 Brooke Magnanti published a statistical re-analysis criticising the
Lilith Report on Lap Dancing and Striptease in the Borough of Camden, a study which had claimed that sexual crimes increased after the opening of
lap dancing venues in the area; the analysis showed this was not the case. The independent London newspaper the
Camden New Journal highlighted Magnanti's criticism of the Lilith findings. In May 2016 Magnanti, alongside
Paris Lees, was called to give evidence about sex work conditions in the UK to the Home Affairs Committee investigating prostitution laws in Britain. of those arrested for prostitution-related crimes. Sex worker nonprofits called the apparent U-turn decision "a stunning victory for sex workers and our demands for decriminalisation" and "a giant step forward for sex workers' rights in the UK."
Secret Diary of a Call Girl A television series loosely based on the first book was in development with
Channel 4 in the UK, but eventually aired on
ITV2 as
Secret Diary of a Call Girl. The first series aired from 27 September 2007 to 15 November 2007 starring
Billie Piper as
Hannah Baxter (Belle). Magnanti met Piper in the course of preparing for the role but maintained her anonymity. A half-hour TV programme covering a meeting and conversation between the two was broadcast on
ITV2 on 25 January 2010. The second series commenced broadcasting in the UK on
ITV2 on 11 September 2008. The third series began broadcasting in the UK in January 2010. The fourth and final series started broadcasting in the UK on ITV2 in February 2011. ==Personal life==