Brooke Magnanti

View Reviews of books by Brooke Magnanti

Countdown with ...

Brooke Magnanti

Brooke Magnanti is a scientist and author. Some people may know her as former call girl blogger Belle de Jour, the inspiration for ITV and Showtime's series Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Others may know her as Dr Brooke Magnanti, forensic scientist and columnist. She is also the writer of The Sex Myth.

She is a columnist for the Telegraph's Wonder Women, former science editor of Cliterati, and has contributed pieces to the Guardian, Big Issue, and Town. Brooke was featured in an episode of Stephen Fry's Planet Word and is a popular public speaker on the themes of biometric and forensic science, sexualisation and popular culture, and internet anonymity and identity.

Brooke was born in west central Florida in 1975. She later studied for a Master's in Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Sheffield in England, and earned a Ph.D. in the Forensic Pathology department there, specialising in human decomposition and post-mortem identification. She has worked in forensic science, epidemiology, chemoinformatics and cancer research. Brooke currently lives in rural NW Scotland with her husband.

Interviewed 11 June 2016

Ten words to sum up your working life to date ...

I'm very good at making plans, better at changing them.

Nine things you can see from where you're sitting ...

I'm in Telluride right now for skiing, so mountains take up more than half of the list. Some trees, a coffee mug, a red blanket, and tracks in the snow – probably from a squirrel.

Eight minutes to prepare a meal. What's it going to be ?

Pasta alla puttanesca. Obviously.

Seven people you'd like to go for a drink with ...

My mother's mother, her four surviving children, my husband and my best friend. Everyone is scattered all around the world so getting to see people at the same time would be a treat.

Six things you can't live without ...

I can live without anything. Once you've lost all your stuff in a transcontinental move and a house fire, it kind of rewires how you think about ‘things.’

Five favourite words ...

This can't possibly end badly.

Four places you'd run away to ...

Haha, I'm not giving that away! It's not running away if everyone has a shortlist of places to hunt you down.

Three books you've bought recently ...

Throwing Lead: A Writer's Guide to Firearms by J Daniel Sawyer and Mary Mason
Petty: The Biography by Warren Zanes
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson

Two things that make you rant ...

People who just stand there when they get off the top of Tube escalators, and bigots.

One thing you'd tell your teenage self ...

Trust me, it's far better not to peak at age 15.