It feels so much better on this side. Not to have to tell lies, hide things from the people I care about. To be able to defend what my experience of sex work is like to all the sceptics and doubters. Anonymity had a purpose then - it will always have a reason to exist, for writers whose work is too damaging or too controversial to put their names on

A spokesperson for Bristol University stated, "This aspect of Dr Magnanti's past is not relevant to her current role at the university", while her publisher said, "It's a courageous decision for Belle de Jour to come forward with her true identity and we support her decision to do so".

He: "So why do you do this?"
Me: "I'm not sure I have an answer to that."
"There must be something that you at least tell yourself."
"Well, perhaps I'm the sort of person apt to do something for no good reason other than I can't think of a reason not to."

“

”

The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl

Magnanti says she worked for 14 months as a 300-an-hour prostitute for a London escort agency from 2003, after submitting her PhD thesis. She did so due to lack of funds before her viva voce at the University of Sheffield in 2003.

She had previously been a science blogger using her real name and started blogging about sex work under a pseudonym. Diary of a London Call Girl was voted Blog of the Year by The Guardian newspaper in 2003. Awards judge Bruce Sterling called it "Archly transgressive, anonymous hooker is definitely manipulating the blog medium, word by word, sentence by sentence far more effectively than any of her competitors ... She is in a league by herself as a blogger." Shortly after receiving the award she signed with literary agency Conville and Walsh who negotiated a publishing deal with Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Reviews of the books compared her writing to the works of Martin Amis and Nick Hornby, and she frequently quotes from the poems of Philip Larkin. Themes of the blog and books focus on isolation and personae. "Solitude as much as sex propels these books ... Belle's prickly disbelief in any lasting togetherness picks up an almost existential heft." She writes in Playing the Game "it's not all about the sex - never has been - it's about the heart of darkness."

Magnanti's publisher, Orion Books, printed her first two books as part of its "Non Fiction/Memoir" line. Her third book was classified as fiction and represents a fictional continuation from the first two. Her books have been published in the UK, US, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic, Romania, Russia, and China.

From November 2005 until May 2006, Magnanti contributed a regular column in The Sunday Telegraph. Since her identity had been revealed she has written about UK libel laws and their effect on science for the Guardian's website Comment Is Free.

On 25 February 2010 Magnanti appeared on the BBC political affairs programme This Week to discuss the subject of . She is also an occasional guest on The Book Show broadcast on Sky Arts and has spoken at a number of venues including The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival in conversation with India Knight. She has also spoken on internet and forensic identity as part of the Bristol Festival of Ideas and was a guest on the Stephen Fry 2011 series Fry's Planet Word.

In 2011 Magnanti closed down the Belle de Jour blog and started to use the original url as her official website instead. She continued blogging at her two blogs The Sex Myth and The Gyst Of It. The former deals with social and political topics related to sexuality, whereas the latter deals with all things related to yeast (=gyst), primarily recipes and food preparation.

In 2012 Magnanti was selected as ambassador for the Inverness Whisky Festival. In the latter half of the year Magnanti, along with Tobias Hill, acted as a judge for Fleeting Magazine's Six-Word Short Story Prize. She was interviewed by the magazine in May, where she described her penchant for 'things that ferment'. She was interviewed on Hardtalk on the BBC in October.

Since 2012 she has been contributing blogger to The Daily Telegraph.

Magnanti's PhD thesis, awarded from the University of Sheffield Department of Forensic Pathology, was entitled Macrobioinformatics: the application of informatics methods to records of human remains. It was submitted in September 2003 and the degree was awarded in 2004. After moving to London and while blogging as Belle de Jour she also worked as a computer programmer in cheminformatics at InforSense. She blogged about this career at Cosmas.