Brooke Magnanti

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."

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. The resulting recommendations by the committee headed by Keith Vaz, released in July 2016, implemented the pair's suggestions to eliminate criminal records 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."

She is honoured in BBC'S 100 Women in 2013 and 2014.

Magnanti is married and used to live in Lochaber in the Scottish Highlands. She became a British citizen in 2013, and moved back to the United States in 2016.

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.

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.

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 June 2011, an ex-boyfriend issued a libel writ against The Sunday Times for a claim of defamation caused by his mention in the paper. The writ, filed by Flight Lieutenant Owen Morris of RAF Lossiemouth, claimed that following her outing, he was identified as her former boyfriend and therefore mentions of his harassment in the articles had been damaging even though they did not mention him by name. The Sunday Times printed an apology in February 2012, followed by The Week who agreed to pay damages.

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.

The third series began broadcasting in the UK and North America in January 2010. The fourth and final series started broadcasting in the UK on ITV2 in February 2011.

On 15 November 2009, The Sunday Times revealed in an interview that the author's real name is Brooke Magnanti, who was 34 years of age at the time. The Guardian' s Paul Gallagher described it as the revelation of "one of the best kept literary secrets of the decade". The Daily Telegraph' s Stephen Adams said it had been "the new millennium's equivalent of the 1980s' search for the golden hare". Such was the nature of the secret that Magnanti's colleagues did not know until one month before she went public, her publishers had been unaware of her true identity until the previous week and her parents found out on that weekend.

In 2007 Belle's blogs and books were adapted into a television programme, Secret Diary of a Call Girl starring Billie Piper as Belle, with the real name Hannah Baxter. In November 2009, fearing her real identity was about to come out, Magnanti revealed her real name and occupation as a child health scientist.

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), and later shown in the US on Showtime. Magnanti met Piper in the course of preparing for the role but maintained her pseudonymity. 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.

Her diary, published as the anonymous blog Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl, became increasingly popular as speculation surrounded the identity of Belle de Jour. Remaining anonymous, Magnanti went on to have her experiences published as The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl in 2005 and The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl in 2006. Her first two books were UK top 10 best-sellers in the nonfiction hardback and nonfiction paperback lists.

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 Guardian' s website Comment Is Free.

The weblog Belle de Jour: Diary of a London call girl first appeared in October 2003 and won the Guardian newspaper's Best British Weblog 2003, in the second year of the award's existence. There was speculation in the media for several years as to the real identity of the author, whether Belle really was a call girl. Guesses as to who Belle was ranged from Rowan Pelling to Toby Young according to The Telegraph. In 2004 The Sunday Times featured a front-page headline incorrectly identifying Sarah Champion as the author of the blog based on erroneous textual analysis by Donald Foster.

According to The Guardian a fellow British blogger guessed her identity in 2003 but kept it secret. He made a page on his blog containing the googlewhack of Belle de Jour and Brooke Magnanti that allowed him to see if anyone googled the two names. In 2009 he identified IP addresses originating from Associated Newspapers that had accessed the page at which point he contacted Magnanti to alert her. Around the same time tabloid reporters had been escorted from the hospital where she worked for breaking into her office.

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 did so due to lack of funds before her viva voce at the University of Sheffield in 2003 and is estimated to have earned more than £100,000 in that period.

She had previously been a science blogger using her real name and started blogging about sex work under a pseudonym. Diary of a London Call Girl was voted Blog of the Year by The Guardian newspaper in 2003. Awards judge Bruce Sterling called it "Archly transgressive, anonymous hooker is definitely manipulating the blog medium, word by word, sentence by sentence far more effectively than any of her competitors ... She is in a league by herself as a blogger." Shortly after receiving the award she signed with literary agency Conville and Walsh who negotiated a publishing deal with Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

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.

She entered university at the age of 16, going on to receive a B.S. in 1996 from Florida State University. Relocating to the United Kingdom, Magnanti studied for a master's degree in genetic epidemiology and Ph.D. in forensic science from the University of Sheffield in England.

Born in the United States to an Italian American father and Jewish American mother, Magnanti was born and grew up in Clearwater, Florida. She graduated from the private Clearwater Central Catholic High School where she was named a National Merit Scholar in 1992.

Brooke Magnanti (born 5 November 1975) is an American-born naturalised British former research scientist, blogger, and writer, who, until her identity was revealed in November 2009, was known by the pen name Belle de Jour. While completing her doctoral studies, between 2003 and 2004, Magnanti supplemented her income by working as a London call girl known by the working name Taro.

Magnanti's pseudonym was derived from the 1928 novel Belle de jour by Joseph Kessel and the 1967 film of the same name starring Catherine Deneuve, directed by Luis Buñuel. In the film, "Belle de Jour" is an expression translating literally as "daytime beauty", as Deneuve's character frequented the brothel during the daytime, when her husband was absent from home. The expression is a pun on the French phrase "belle de nuit", which translates as "lady of the night", i.e. a prostitute.