Free book event: Show and Tell Book Club at BLOC Cinema

Join us for a special edition discussing Julia Bell’s pioneering book Radical Attention. She will be in conversation with Jonathan Keane.

About the book: Radical Attention

An essay on the battle for our attention in the age of distraction.

In today‘s online economy it has become a commodity to be bought and sold. Bombarding us with free smartphone apps and news websites, developers and advertisers have turned what and how focus our attention into the world‘s fastest growing industry.

In exchange for our attention, information and entertainment is ever at our fingertips. But at what cost? In this essay, at once personal and polemical, meditative and militant, Julia Bell asks what has been lost in this trade off. How can we reclaim our attention? In a world of infinite distraction, how can attention become radical?

About the speaker: Julia Bell

Julia is a Reader in Creative Writing and writer who teaches at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely across poetry, non-fiction and fiction. As well as the author of three novels she is the co-editor of bestselling The Creative Writing Coursebook, and her most recent book-length essay on attention in the internet age Radical Attention has been recommended by Ali Smith as one of the books for the next twenty years. Her collection of poetry Hymnal was nominated as Welsh book of the Month and her essays and short stories have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, The Paris Review and Prospect as well as broadcast on the BBC. As well as working at Birkbeck she has given talks and workshops across many contexts for London Zoo, RIBA, the Selfridges Group, MAD/Fest, and the British Council.

Show and Tell is a series of inspiring talks hosted by BLOC.