Julie Burchill

Julie Burchill (born 3 July 1959) is an English writer. Beginning as a journalist on the staff of the New Musical Express at the age of 17, she has subsequently contributed to newspapers such as The Sunday Times and The Guardian. Describing herself as a "militant feminist", she has several times been involved in legal action resulting from her work. Burchill is also an author and novelist: her 1989 novel Ambition became a best-seller, and her 2004 novel Sugar Rush was adapted for television.

Julie Burchill was born in Bristol, England, and educated at Brislington Comprehensive School. Her father was a Communist union activist who worked in a distillery. Her mother had a job in a cardboard box factory. In 2010, Burchill wrote of her parents: "I don't care much for families. I adored my mum and dad, but to be honest I don't miss them much now they're dead", although three years later she contradicted this when she said she couldn't return to Bristol, as every time she heard someone speaking with her parents' Bristol accent it would remind her how much she missed them. She did not attend university, leaving the A-levels she had started a few weeks earlier to begin writing for the New Musical Express (NME).

She started her career, aged 17, as a writer at the New Musical Express (NME) after responding, coincidentally with her future husband Tony Parsons, to an advert in that paper seeking "hip young gunslingers" to write about the then emerging punk movement. She gained the job by submitting a "eulogy" of Patti Smith's Horses. She later wrote that at the time she only liked black music, and "When I actually heard a punk record, I thought, ‘Oh my Lord! This is not music, this is just shouting'." Fortunately for her, as she later said, "Punk was over in two years. That was the only damn good thing about it." She left her position at the NME at the age of 20, and started freelancing to be able to write about other subjects, although she has never completely given up writing about pop music.