Dubbed “The Meryl Streep of Audiobooks” by bestselling author Taylor Jenkins Reid, “The Adele of Audiobooks” by The New Yorker, and yes, even “The Michael Jordan of Audio” by General David H. Petraeus, Julia Whelan is an author, screenwriter, lifelong actor, and acclaimed audiobook narrator of over 700 titles.
She is, most recently, the recipient of Spotify’s Narrator of the Year Award (the most listened-to narrator globally), the first-ever Gracie Award for Best Fiction Narrator (presented by the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation), the SOVAS (Society of Voice Arts and Sciences) Lifetime Achievement Award, and winner of the Audie Award for Best Fiction Narrator of 2025. She also captured both the winner and runner-up slots in the inaugural audiobook category of the Goodreads Choice Awards.
Her performance of her own debut novel, the international bestseller My Oxford Year, garnered a SOVAS award and was released in August, 2025 as a Netflix film. Her 2022 novel, Thank You for Listening, was a Best-of-the-Year pick at Amazon, Audible, and NPR as well as a Goodreads Choice Award nominee and winner of the Golden Poppy.
Julia has also applied her talent to voicing longform journalism. As head of production at the start-up Audm (since acquired by the New York Times), she has voiced Susan Glasser, Jane Mayer, Rebecca Traister, Ronan Farrow, and Davis Sedaris, among other well-known journalists. Her voice has become a staple for magazines such as Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and more. She has most recently become the voice of the arts & design magazine, Palm Springs Life.
She has been the keynote speaker at Nashville’s WriterFest, Adventure by the Book’s Super Book event, OverDrive’s Digipalooza 2025, and was also the opening keynote at the 2025 CLA (California Library Association) conference. She is a multi-year invited guest at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival (2024, 2025, and upcoming 2026), a speaker at ALA (American Library Association), and has moderated/performed at multiple conferences, libraries, and events.
Julia is the founder of Audiobrary, an audio publishing and distribution company with its own app, which seeks to change how creatives (authors and narrators) are compensated in the audiobook industry. Her latest books — the Audie nominated duet romance, Casanova LLC, and the annotated Victorian poetry anthology The Poetry of My Oxford Year — debuted exclusively on Audiobrary.
She is also a Grammy-nominated audiobook director, a former writing tutor, a half-decent amateur baker, and a certified tea sommelier. She lives in California’s Coachella Valley.
