About Bella
DR. BELLA ELLWOOD-CLAYTON writes page-turning fiction about relationships, secrets, and desire.
With a PhD examining women’s sexuality and relationships, she spent years researching the messy realities of intimacy, deception, and the gap between words and actions. That expertise finds its way into her fiction, where marriages come under strain, friendships hide cracks, and characters discover that getting what they want can be more complicated than they imagined.
Her novels include The Tradwife’s Lie (Joffe Books 2026), The Swimming Group (Joffe Books 2025), and Weekend Friends (Post Hill Press 2023)—hailed as “unputdownable” by bestselling author Nicola Moriarty. All her novels are available as audiobooks. She is represented by Jill Marsal of Marsal Lyon Literary Agency.
Born on Valentine’s Day in Melbourne to avant-garde composer and playwright Syd Clayton and enlightenment-seeker Gwenda Ellwood, Bella’s childhood was split between Melbourne and Vancouver. At nine, after a knee injury landed her in hospital, she wrote her first line of poetry:
Raindrops on the window meet like lovers after a long separation.
During her weeks in hospital, a friend’s mother gifted her a book of poetry and a blank notebook. From that moment, Bella never stopped writing. Journal in hand, she found deeper companionship on the page than almost anything else. Much more reliable.
She survived high school.
After completing a BA in anthropology at Concordia University in Montréal, Bella travelled to Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands with National Geographic, where she explored how local people altered their bodies according to traditional ideals of beauty. Her work was featured in a documentary about the meaning behind body modification.
Her first short story was published in her early twenties, along with poetry in various journals. Her creative work has appeared in Mystery Weekly Magazine, The Cabinet of Heed, Voices Israel Anthology, and Fly on the Wall Press. Offered a PhD scholarship, she conducted ethnographic research in the Philippines on young women’s sexual and reproductive health. Her fieldwork evolved into expertise in desire, secrecy, connection, and the complicated dynamics of intimate relationships. Academia felt too constrained. She wanted to take her knowledge about sexuality and relationships to the mainstream.
Back in Australia, Bella became a sex and relationship columnist for mX and Sunday Life Magazine in The Age and Sydney Sun-Herald. She has written for The Huffington Post, published the non-fiction book Sex Drive: In Pursuit of Female Desire (Allen & Unwin), and appeared regularly on Triple M, The Project, Sunrise. She has also spoken widely about relationships, including a TEDx talk with 850,000 views.
At Polly, the Fitzroy bar, she met an Adelaide-born management consultant. After an intense conversation, she told her friends the next morning, “I’ve met the man I’m going to marry.” Thirteen months later, wearing her grandmother’s wartime wedding dress, she said, “I do.”
Marriage, motherhood, and the daily intimacies of long-term partnership revealed what her research had long hinted at: the most compelling stories live in the space between what we show the world and what we hide. Over the next fifteen years, Bella turned herfocus to fiction—writing, editing, and coaching others. She serves as Head of Editorial at NAC Literary Agency and runs Dr. Bella Editorial, working with emerging and bestselling authors through developmental editing and book coaching to bring their stories to life.
She lives in Melbourne with her husband, two screen-obsessed teens, and a mini Maltese with delusions of grandeur. She’s currently brainstorming her next novel.
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