Author: Julia Whelan

By her own count Julia Whelan has recorded more than seven hundred audiobooks, among them titles by Gillian Flynn, Emily Henry and Taylor Jenkins Reid. She reached that work through acting. Born in 1984, she played Grace Manning through three seasons of the American family drama Once and Again, then read at Middlebury College, with a year as a visiting student at Lincoln College, Oxford, before stepping away from screen work in her twenties. Thank You for Listening, her second novel, arrived in 2022 and draws straight on the trade she knows. Its narrator, Sewanee Chester, gave up acting after an accident, now voices romance novels she is faintly embarrassed by, and takes one last commission. My Oxford Year, the 2018 novel that preceded it, was later filmed for Netflix, and she reads both books herself. She has since founded Audiobrary, an audio publisher committed to human narration rather than synthetic voice.