Julian Heward Bell (1908 - 1937) was an English poet, and the son of Clive and Vanessa Bell. The writer Quentin Bell was his younger brother.

He was brought up mainly at Charleston, Sussex . He was educated at Leighton Park and King's College, Cambridge, where he joined the Cambridge Apostles. After graduating he worked towards a college fellowship, without success.

In 1935 he went to China, to a position teaching English at Wuhan University. He wrote letters describing his relationship with a lover, K.; the identity of this woman became a sensitive issue when the Chinese-British novelist Hong Ying wrote a fictionalised account, K: The Art of Love. After a 2002 ruling by a Chinese court that the book was 'defamation of the dead', the author rewrote the book, which was published in 2003 under the title The English Lover.

In 1937 he took part in the Spanish Civil War, as an ambulance driver on the Republican side. He was killed in the battle at Brunete .

Works

• Winter Movement (1930) poems
• We Did Not Fight: 1914-18 Experiences of War Resisters. (1935) editor
• Work for the Winter (1936) poems
• Essays, Poems and Letters (1938) edited by Quentin Bell

Reference

• Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China (2003) Patricia Laurence