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Julie Burchill (born 3 July 1959) is an English writer. Beginning as a staff writer at the New Musical Express at the age of 17, she has since contributed to newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times and The Guardian. Her writing, which was described by John Arlidge in The Observer in 2002 as "outrageously outspoken" and "usually offensive," has been the subject of legal action. Burchill is also a novelist, and her 2004 novel Sugar Rush was adapted for television.
During the Falklands War in 1982, Burchill argued that the military dictatorship of General Galtieri represented a greater evil. She wrote articles favourable to Margaret Thatcher. Her sympathy for Thatcher helped in gaining a column for The Mail on Sunday, where in 1987 she went against the paper's usual political line by urging its readers to vote Labour. Though she claims to like the MoS, she said of journalists on the Daily Mail in 2008: "Everybody knows that hacks are the biggest bunch of adulterers, the most misbehaving profession in the world – and you have people writing for the Daily Mail writing as though they are vicars ... moralising on single mothers and whatnot."
In 1991, Burchill, Landesman and Toby Young established a short-lived magazine Modern Review through which she met Charlotte Raven, with whom she had a much publicised affair. "I was only a lesbian for about six weeks in 1995," she said in an interview with Lynn Barber in 2004,Lynn Barber "Growing pains" , The Observer, 22 August 2004. Retrieved 3 August 2008. or "my very enjoyable six months of lesbianism" in a 2000 article.Julie Burchill "Self indulgent" , The Guardian, 17 June 2000. Retrieved 3 August 2008. Launched under the slogan "Low culture for high brows", the magazine lasted until 1995, when Burchill and her colleagues fell out. It was briefly revived by Burchill, with Raven editing, in 1997. The "Fax war"Christina Patterson "Camille Paglia – 'I don't get along with lesbians at all. They don't like me, and I don't like them'" , The Independent, 25 August 2012 in 1993 between Burchill and author Camille Paglia, published in the Modern Review,Tara Brabazon "Making it big: bitch politics and writing in public" , Australian Humanities Review, June 1997 gained much attention.Tanya Gold "Fights of the feminists" , The Spectator, 15 September 2012.
In 1995, Burchill wrote a column for The Times, titled "I'm a bitch, and I'm proud", in which she argued that women should reclaim the word 'bitch,' used as a slur. She wrote: "it is the nature of these things that, in recent years, the slighted have taken steps to repossess the slight; thus, we have blacks who call each other 'nigger', pansies who call each other 'queer' and upper-class cretins who quite happily call each other 'Henry'."
In 1996, the actor, author, playwright and theatre director Steven Berkoff won a Defamation against Burchill in respect of one of her articles, published in the Sunday Times newspaper, which included comments suggesting that he was "hideously ugly". The judge ruled that Burchill's actions "held him to ridicule and contempt." The late 1990s were a turbulent period for Burchill as she has recalled:
The following year's Burchill on Beckham (2001), a short book about Burchill's opinions concerning David Beckham's life, career, and relationship with Victoria Beckham, attracted "some of the worst notices since Jeffrey Archer's heyday. 'Burchill is to football writing what Jimmy Hill is to feminist polemics'," wrote one reviewer. According to Robert Winder in the New Statesman: "The book fits in with Burchill's theme of praising the working class; Burchill presents Beckham as an anti-laddish symbol of old working-class values – he reminds her of those proud men of her childhood, 'paragons of generosity, industry and chastity'."
For five years until 2003, Burchill wrote a weekly column in The Guardian. Appointed in 1998 by Orr, while editor of the Guardian Weekend supplement, Burchill's career was in trouble; she had been sacked by the revived Punch magazine. Burchill frequently thanked Deborah Orr for rescuing her. One of the pieces she wrote for The Guardian was in reaction to the murder of BBC TV presenter Jill Dando in 1999. She compared the shock of Dando's murder to finding a "tarantula in a punnet full of strawberries". In 2002 she narrowly escaped prosecution for incitement to racial hatred, "following a Guardian column where she described Ireland as being synonymous with child molestation, Nazi-sympathising, and the oppression of women".O'Brien, Jonathan "Unruly Julie: Julie Burchill", The Sunday Business Post (Wayback Machine Internet Archive), 25 August 2002. Burchill had expressed anti-Irish sentiment several times throughout her career, announcing in the London journal Time Out that "I hate the Irish, I think they're appalling".Shapero, Lindsay, "Red devil", Time Out, 17–23 May 1984, p. 27.
She supported the Iraq War, writing in The Guardian in 2003 that she was "in favour of a smaller war now rather than a far worse war later", and criticised those opposed to the war as "pro-Saddam apologists". She justified her stance by stating that "this war is about freedom, justice – and oil" and that because Britain and the United States sold weapons to Iraq that, "it is our responsibility to redress our greed and ignorance by doing the lion's share in getting rid of him".
Burchill left The Guardian acrimoniously, saying in an interview that they had offered her a sofa in lieu of a pay rise. She stated that she left the newspaper in protest at what she saw as its "vile anti-Semitism".
Following her departure from The Guardian, in early 2005 she moved to The Times, who were more willing to meet her demands, doubling her previous salary. The Independent, 21 February 2005, Julie Burchill: Me and my big mouth Shortly after starting her weekly column, she referred to George Galloway, but appeared to confuse him with former MP Ron Brown, reporting the misdeeds of Brown as those of Galloway, "he incited Arabs to fight British troops in Iraq."Owen Gibson "Galloway demands Burchill apology" , The Guardian, 16 March 2004. Retrieved 23 June 2007. She apologised in her column and The Times paid damages thought to have been £50,000. "'Gorgeous George' has his day in court" , The Scotsman, 19 March 2004
In 2006, The Times dropped her Saturday column, and arranged a more flexible arrangement with Burchill writing for the daily paper.Stephen Brook "Burchill goes on sabbatical for God" , The Guardian, 9 February 2006. Retrieved 23 June 2007. Later it emerged, during a Guardian interview published on 4 August 2008,Ben Dowell Interview: Julie Burchill: 'I have no ambition left' , The Guardian, 4 August 2008. that eventually she "was given the jolly old heave ho" by The Times, and paid off for the last year of her three-year contract, still receiving the £300,000 she would have earned if she had been obliged to provide copy. She later described her columns for her abbreviated Times contract, which ended abruptly in 2007, thus: "I was totally taking the piss. I didn't spend much time on them and they were such arrant crap."
In February 2006, she announced plans for a year's sabbatical from journalism, planning, among other things, to study theology. In June 2007, she announced that she would not be returning to journalism, but instead concentrate on writing books and TV scripts and finally undertake a theology degree,Stephen Brook "Julie Burchill bows out of journalism" , The Guardian, 21 June 2007. Retrieved 23 June 2007. but she returned to writing for The Guardian newspaper.Julie Burchill "Why I Love Tesco" , The Guardian, 19 December 2007. Retrieved 20 December 2007.
Burchill's co-written book with Chas Newkey-Burden, Not in My Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, appeared in August 2008, and is dedicated "to Arik and Bibi" (Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu). According to Gerald Jacobs, writing for The Jewish Chronicle in 2008, "this book does not merely stand up for Israel, it jumps up and down, cheers and waves its arms".Gerald Jacobs "Julie Burchill: Brash, outspoken and wishing she was Jewish" , The Jewish Chronicle, 8 August 2008 The newspaper described her as "Israel's staunchest supporter in the UK media". When asked if Israel has any flaws, she responded: "Yes. They are much too tolerant of their freaking neighbours, much too reasonable".
She declared in 2005, after Ariel Sharon's withdrawal of Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, that "Israel is the only country I would fucking die for. He's the enemy of the Jews. Chucking his own people off the Gaza; to me that's disgusting".Granger, Ben, "Julie Burchill: Sugar Rush: Hurricane Julie" , Spike magazine, June 2005. Besides writing occasional pieces for The Guardian, she wrote four articles for the centre-right politics and culture magazine Standpoint between July and October 2008.
Commenting on the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, Burchill wrote in The Independent: "It would be wonderful to think that what replaces Mubarak will be better. But here's the thing about Middle Eastern regimes: they're all vile. The ones that are 'friendly' are vile and the ones that hate us are vile. Revolutions in the region have a habit of going horribly wrong, and this may well have something to do with the fact that Islam and democracy appear to find it difficult to co-exist for long."
On 13 January 2013, Burchill wrote an article for The Observer defending Suzanne Moore after a reference by Moore to transsexuals had been greeted with a great deal of criticism. In Burchill's view, it showed the "chutzpah" of transsexuals to have their "cock cut off and then plead special privileges as women". There were a number of objections to her writing from members of the transgender community and non-transgender community alike. The editor of The Observer, John Mulholland, responded on the comments page to what he described as "many emails protesting about this piece" and stated that he would be looking into the issue. Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone, formerly a junior Minister for Women and Equalities, called for the dismissal of Burchill and Mulholland in response to the piece. The article was withdrawn from the website the following day and replaced with a message from Mulholland, "Statement from John Mulholland, editor of The Observer" , Observer/Guardian website, 14 January 2013 but reappeared on the Telegraph website.Toby Young (sic) "Here is Julie Burchill's censored Observer article", Telegraph, 14 January 2013. See also Toby Young "The Observer's decision to censor Julie Burchill is a disgrace", The Telegraph, 14 January 2013 On 18 January, The Observers Readers Editor Stephen Pritchard defended the decision to remove the article from the newspaper's website, quoting the editor who took that decision as saying "This clearly fell outside what we might consider reasonable. The piece should not have been published in that form. I don't want the Observer to be conducting debates on those terms or with that language. It was offensive, needlessly. We made a misjudgment and we apologise for that".Stephen Pritchard "Julie Burchill and the Observer, The readers' editor on why the paper was wrong to publish slurs against trans people" , The Guardian, 18 January 2013
In 1999, Burchill said she "found God", and became a Lutheranism and later a "self-confessed Christian Zionist". In June 2007, she announced that she would undertake a theology degree, although she subsequently decided to do voluntary work instead as a way to learn more about Christianity.
In June 2009, The Jewish Chronicle reported that Burchill had become a Friend of Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue and was again considering a conversion to Judaism. According to TheJC, she had attended Shabbat services for a month, and studying Hebrew, she described herself as an "ex-Christian", pointing out that she had been pondering on her conversion since the age of 25. Burchill said that "At a time of rising and increasingly vicious anti-semitism from both left and right, becoming Jewish especially appeals to me. ... Added to the fact that I admire Israel so much, it does seem to make sense – assuming of course that the Jews will have me". She wrote in November 2012: "The things I love about the Jews are: their religion, their language and their ancient country".
Burchill clashed with Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah of the Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue, and the Rabbi's lesbian partner, Jess Woods. Among the reasons for their differences was Rabbi Sarah's defence of Muslims and her advocacy of the Palestinian cause. In Burchill's words, the rabbi "respects PIG ISLAM". Rabbi Sarah told The Independent in September 2014: "The problem is Burchill doesn’t have any in-depth knowledge. I can imagine her endlessly watching the film Exodus with Paul Newman. She’s got a kind of Hollywood view of Jews. You know, ‘Jews are so clever, we’ve survived ...'."
In 2014, Burchill's Crowdfunding book Unchosen: The Memoirs of a Philo-Semite was published. Tel Aviv-based writer Akin Ajayi in Haaretz thought "the reactionary solipsism of Unchosen is far removed from the affectionate warmness that a love of the Jewish people can be". Burchill's ex-husband, Cosmo Landesman, considered it to be an "exhilarating and exasperating mix of the utterly brilliant and the totally bonkers". He observes that "there are plenty of Jews Julie doesn't love" including the "millions of Jews around the world who have ever criticised Israel. Her love is blind, deaf and dumb to such an obvious contradiction". Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman wrote: "Burchill divides up the chosen people into Good Jews (hardliners, Israelites) and Bad Jews (liberal Jews) with the enthusiasm of an antisemite. Hilariously, she sets herself up as the Jewishness Police, railing against Jews who are not Jewish enough". In his review in The Independent, Keith Kahn-Harris described Unchosen as "occasionally touching, sometimes bigoted and sporadically hilarious" but that it "often degenerates into EDL-style abuse that lacks any redeeming wit." In The Guardian Will Self wrote, "I’m afraid I can’t really dignify her latest offering with the ascription 'book', nor the contents therein as 'writing' – rather they are sophomoric, hammy effusions, wrongheaded, rancorous, and pathetically self-aggrandising."
In November 1980, former Sex Pistols front man John Lydon gave an interview to Ann Louise Bardach in which he referred to Burchill and Tony Parsons as "toss-bag journalists, desperately trying to get in on something" in response to their book, The Boy Looked at Johnny, and described its chapter on amphetamines as "stupidity". Lydon was incensed by Burchill and Parsons attributing his talent to his alleged use of the drug in their book.
In October 1999, in an article for The Guardian, she wrote: "That young men succeed in suicide more often than girls isn't really the point. Indeed, the more callous among us would say that it was quite nice for young men finally to find something that they're better at than girls". After a previous occasion when Burchill wrote "suicides should be left to get on with it", she "received a small number of letters from people whose sons had killed themselves".
In 2002, her life was the subject of a one-woman West End play, Julie Burchill is Away, by Tim Fountain, with Burchill played by her friend Jackie Clune. A sequel by Fountain, Julie Burchill: Absolute Cult, followed in 2014, with Lizzie Roper in the central role.Neil Cooper "Burchill back in spotlight as play shows she remains a Cult figure" , The Herald (Glasgow), 7 August 2014
In 2003, Burchill was ranked number 85 in Channel 4's poll of 100 Worst Britons.Evan Maloney "Insulting other people" , news.com.au, 17 November 2006Helen Brown "'Sorry... was that rude?'" , The Telegraph, 31 March 2007 The poll was inspired by the BBC series 100 Greatest Britons, though it was less serious in nature. The aim was to discover the "100 worst Britons we love to hate". The poll specified that the nominees had to be British, alive and not currently in prison or pending trial. In 2005, on the 25th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon, she told The Guardian: "I don't remember where I was but I was really pleased he was dead, as he was a wife-beater, gay-basher, anti-Semite and all-round bully-boy." "Where were you the day Lennon died?" The Guardian, 8 December 2005 In the essay "Born Again Cows" published in Damaged Gods (1987), she wrote: "When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women."Quoted by Hannah Betts "We need to face up to hatred of prostitutes – among feminists, too" , The Guardian, 5 March 2013.
On 6 June 2021, and shortly after the announcement of the birth of Lilibet Mountbatten-Windsor, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Burchill tweeted: "What a missed opportunity. They could have called it Georgina Floydina!”, a reference to George Floyd. Her comments were widely condemned, with racial equality activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu stating: "She’s (Lilibet) referred to as 'IT'. The utter disrespect & dehumanisation of #HarryandMeghan children because of their proximity to ‘Blackness’ is Racist"; actress Kelechi Okafor wrote: "Likening baby Lilibet to George Floyd is to honesic in on the fact she isn't fully white...She refers to Lilbet as 'it' even though it has been announced that the baby is a girl and she could've addressed her as such...Disgusting scenes." On 8 June, via her Facebook account, Burchill announced that she had been sacked by The Daily Telegraph as a result of her online comments.
In March 2021, after being sued for libel and harassment, Burchill retracted her comments, issued a full apology and paid substantial damages to Sarkar, including her legal costs.
Burchill stated: "I should not have sent these tweets, some of which included racist and misogynist comments regarding Ms Sarkar's appearance and her sex life." She further apologised for "liking" posts calling on Sarkar to kill herself and promised to refrain from any further harassment of Sarkar.
Immediately after her relationship with Parsons, Burchill married Cosmo Landesman, the son of Fran Landesman and Jay Landesman, with whom she also had a son.Jay Landesman "The designer rebel who slept in our spare room" , The Independent, 29 March 1993 The sons from her marriages with Parsons and Landesman lived with their fathers after the separations. After splitting from Landesman in 1992, she married for a third time in 2004, to Daniel Raven, around 13 years her junior, and the brother of her former lover Charlotte Raven. She wrote of the joys of having a "toyboy" in her Times column in 2010. Fellow NME journalist/author Paul Wellings wrote about their friendship in his book I'm A Journalist...Get Me Out of Here. She has written about her lesbian relationships, and declared that "I would never describe myself as 'heterosexual', 'straight' or anything else. Especially not 'bisexual' (it sounds like a sort of communal vehicle missing a mudguard). I like 'spontaneous' as a sexual description". In 2009 she said that she was only attracted to girls in their 20s, and since she was now nearly 50, "I really don't want to be an old perv. So best leave it".
She has lived in Brighton and Hove since 1995 and a book on her adopted home town titled Made in Brighton (Virgin Books) was published in April 2007. Her house in Hove was sold (and demolished for redevelopment as high-density flats) around 2005 for £1.5 million,Mark Simpson "Cover Story: The queer lady", The Independent on Sunday, 27 March 2005. Retrieved 22 June 2007. of which she has given away £300,000, citing Andrew Carnegie: "A man who dies rich, dies shamed."
Burchill's second son, Jack Landesman, died by suicide in late June 2015, aged 29. In an article for The Sunday Times Magazine, she wrote of his inability over many years to experience pleasure and the serious mental health issues from which he suffered.
In January 2025 Burchill announced that she may never walk again owing to a spinal abscess.
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