AUTHOR PLATFORM: Baird is an op-ed contributor for The New York Times, The Age, and the Sydney Morning Herald and a former writer for Newsweek. She has extensive media contacts and experience and hosts a prominent prime time current affairs TV show in Australia, The Drum on ABCTV.

THE PERFECT INSPIRING BOOK FOR OUR TIMES: Barid addresses how modern life has led to an increase in stress and unhappiness and through a combination of personal experience and research inspires with ways to connect with the light within.

BESTSELLER IN AUSTRALIA: This book was published in Australia in Spring 2020, where it was a #1 bestseller and received great reviews: “A stunning book. The meticulous research throughout Phosphorescence is typical of Baird.” The Guardian; “The chapters embrace the whole of human experience, dense with erudition, emotion and honesty. Reading her words is like spending an evening with a wonderful friend, with unlimited time and a glass of good wine in hand.” The Australian

VICTORIA SOLD 100K copies across formats and was named one of the BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR by The New York Times, Esquire, and The Chicago Public Library

Julia Baird is a bestselling author and award-winning journalist. She hosts The Drum on ABCTV in Australia and writes columns for The New York Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. After moving to the United States to take up a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School, she became a columnist and senior editor at Newsweek. Julia’s biography of Queen Victoria was published in several countries to critical acclaim and was one of The New York Times’s top ten books of the year. She lives near the sea with her two children and a large dog.

Author Residence: Sydney, Australia

Author Hometown: Sydney, Australia

“Julia Baird is an alchemist, turning the dross of her life’s harshest blows into shimmering prose. Ravaged by a broken heart and debilitating cancer, she undertakes a careful examination of what might yet sustain her. Both timeless and timely, this is a book of wisdom and wonder.”—Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of March and Caleb’s Crossing

“Julia Baird’s glorious and gorgeous memoir glows with wisdom and glitters with merriment. This beautiful book is a light in the darkness.”—Sy Montgomery, author of How to Be a Good Creature

“This book is a love letter to the world by a brilliant writer who nearly left it. Julia Baird has gone into the depths of human experience—her own, and others’—and come back with this luminous and profound celebration of people and the planet. Phosphorescence is a treasure to read and re-read your whole life.”—Anna Funder, author of All That I Am and Stasiland

“I loved this book. A cupped hand full of light in a darkened world. A collection of glittering curios. I’ll hold it close in trying times.”—Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment

“Phosphorescence is that rare thing: a book that reminds the reader that change is possible, and that hope is not a luxury but an imperative. Compassionate, expansive, and rigorous, it is a marvel.”—James Bradley, author of The Resurrectionist

“This book is beautiful. It is absolutely my kind of book. A book of tough hope. A light in the dark. A thing of beauty. Phosphorescence itself. [Julia Baird] has been to the tough edges and gives us light. She writes like a dream. Life, nature, hope. You should treat yourself.”—Matt Haig, author of The Midnight Library

“Emotional, introspective…It’s impossible to read this book and not sense a shift in one’s thinking about happiness, joy, and a range of other emotions.”—Kirkus Reviews

“[A] poignant combination of self-help, memoir, and scholarly enlightenment…Baird brings a shimmering intimacy to a universal condition, a beacon of light that both blazes with intensity and bathes with comforting reassurance.”—Booklist