Ella Whelan

Ella Whelan grew up on an inner-city London estate in an Irish working-class family. While studying for a masters in English Literature at the University of Sussex, she began to write for various publications about free speech and feminism. After graduating in 2014, Ella joined spiked, the online political magazine dedicated to freedom of speech, where she is currently a columnist and one third of the weekly spikd podcast.

Ella is the co-convenor of the Battle of Ideas festival – the biggest free-speech public festival in the UK. She is an experienced chair and panel speaker, with appearances at Intelligence Squared, Google, How The Light Gets In, Hay Festival, Festival of Politics, Jermyn Street Theatre, The Arcola, Wigtown Book Festival, The Cambridge Union, Bradford Literature Festival, The Economist Open Future Festival, The Academy and others. She has spoken internationally in Warsaw, Washington DC, Athens, Zurich, Dublin, Belfast, Galway, Cork and Berlin.

In 2017, Ella published What Women Want: Fun, Freedom and an End to Feminism – a short book which continues to cause trouble in media discussions. In 2020, she produced and presented a BBC Radio4 documentary entitled Girl Power RIP, looking at the history of feminism and whether it has lost its way.

Ella regularly appears on TV and radio commenting on a range of political and cultural issues, including Question Time, Today, NewsTalk, Sky News Press Preview, GMB, GBNews, LBC, Woman’s Hour, Any Questions, RTE, Moral Maze, The Tonight Show, Politics Live, Channel 4 and others. She writes regularly for The Critic and the Telegraph, and has written for the Sunday Times, The Economist, the Irish Times, the Sun, Conscience, the Spectator, City Am, the IBT, Grazia, Standpoint and others. Her interviews, including Slavoj Zizek, Fiona Shaw, Camille Paglia and Lionel Shriver, are published in the spiked review.