Gail Bell

Gail spoke with Richard Glover ABC Radio 702 about reports that the agent used to murder Kim Jong-nam – the estranged half-brother of North Korean chairman Kim Jong-un – at Kuala Lumpur Airport on 13 February 2017 was the nerve agent VX, a poison so toxic it is only used in chemical warfare.

British author, the late Terry Pratchett wrote: “I am a compulsive book lender and keep a stock of Gail Bell's The Poison Principle. Bell writes almost seductively about poisons." In 2007 Pratchett nominated it as “one of the five books that changed me.”

Since 2005, Bell has been a regular contributor to The Monthly magazine. Her essay In the Ratroom was collected in The Best Australian Essays 2011 and was shortlisted for the 2011 Voiceless Awards with a special mention from J M Coetzee.

From 2004-2006 Bell was a member of the committee of the Australian Society of Authors.

The Poison Principle: A Memoir about Family Secrets and Literary Poisonings published in June 2001 by Picador, Australia, and 2002 by Macmillan in the UK and St. Martin’s Press in the USA (as Poison) established Bell as a writer of note. Marina Warner, reviewing Poison in The New York Times, writes: “Her book…measures out, in small loving spoonfuls, grains of information about [a] family story … Between the quiet drip feed of her personal memoir, Bell mixes in stronger flavors: ingredients from criminology and psychology, botany and chemistry.”

Bell began publishing short stories and journalism for specialty magazines in the 1990s. Her first book, The Poison Principle became a bestseller and won the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction in 2002. Her second book, SHOT: A Personal Response to Guns and Trauma was shortlisted for the Nita Kibble Literary Award. Her third major publication, the Quarterly Essay # 18 The Worried Well led to strong public responses and national debate.

In 1986 she married Andrew Bell, a photographer and teacher, and moved to the Central Coast of NSW.

Bell was educated at Macarthur Girls’ High School, Parramatta, and at the University of Sydney and Sydney College of Advanced Education. From 1972-1983 she was married to Douwe Winkler, a Dutch immigrant.

Her second book, SHOT: A personal response to Guns and Trauma is a memoir that looks back to a night in 1968 when she was shot in the back while walking home from a train station. The book questions the place of guns in our social world, and explores the intricate, surprising ways our minds deal with traumatic shock.

Gail Bell was born in Sydney in 1950. She has four younger siblings. Her father, Roy, served in the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces during the occupation of Japan after the bombing of Hiroshima. Stories of her father’s early life, as the abandoned son of an alleged poisoner, fed into the writing of her first book The Poison Principle.