Julia Bell

A partner event to the morning’s memoir workshop, Julia Bell, Professor of New Writing at Birkbeck asks what creative writing is for when AI can produce a passable paragraph in seconds? In a session aimed at anyone with ambitions to write, Julia Bell - Professor of New Writing at Birkbeck and author of Between the Lines and the reissued Radical Attention - argues that the rise of generative AI hasn’t made creative writing obsolete - it has made it more necessary. Drawing on philosophy, pedagogy, and nearly thirty years of teaching, she makes the case for writing as a practice of attention: a way of slowing down, looking closely, and thinking for ourselves in a culture engineered to do the opposite. A talk for anyone who reads, writes, teaches, or simply wonders what we lose when we let the machines do the noticing.