Gail Bell Gail Bell i(A30314 works by)
Born: Established: 1950 Sydney, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

Bell studied pharmacy and education at the University of Sydney. She has worked as a pharmacist, a drug educator, a chemistry teacher, a literacy tutor, and an occasional reviewer and journalist, including writing for the New York Times. Her other writing includes The Worried Well: The Depression Epidemic and the Medicalisation of our Sorrows (2005).

Most Referenced Works

Personal Awards

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Shot : A Personal Response to Guns and Trauma Sydney : Picador , 2003 Z1174366 2003 single work prose
2005 shortlisted One Book One Brisbane
2004 shortlisted Kibble Literary Awards Nita Kibble Literary Award
y separately published work icon The Poison Principle : A Memoir of Family Secrets and Literary Poisonings Sydney : Pan Macmillan Australia , 2001 14170555 2001 single work biography autobiography

'When Dr William Macbeth poisoned two of his sons in 1927, his wife and sister hid the murders in the intensely private realm of family secrets. Macbeth behaved as if he were immune to consequences and avoided detection and punishment.

'Or did he? Secrets can be as corrosive as poison, and as time passed, the story haunted and divided his descendants. His granddaughter, Gail Bell, spent ten years reading the literature of poisoning in order to understand Macbeth’s life. Herself a chemist, she listened for echoes in the great cases of the nineteenth century, in myths, fiction, and poison lore.

'Intricate, elegant, and beautifully realised, The Poison Principle is a masterful book about family secrets and literary poisonings. It is a meditation on death, deceit and language, and answers questions like: how do arsenic, cyanide and strychnine work? Why is it so hard to poison someone these days? Was it ever easy? And it finally answers the question of what really happened to those small boys in the winter of 1927.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Brio Books).

2002 shortlisted Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Writing Best True Crime
2002 winner New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction
Last amended 1 Feb 2006 12:35:20
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