Literary Birthday – 8 May – Julia Whelan

Happy Birthday, Julia Whelan, born on 8 May 1984

Julia Whelan Quotes

1. If you know how a book is going to end, why keep on with it? (QuoteFancy)
2. I don’t know where my ideas come from, but you know where they come to? My desk. And if I’m not there to greet them, they leave. Ass in the chair. Ass in the chair. That’s art. (QuoteFancy)
3. It occurs to me now that being called upon to do something because you’re good at it is not the same thing as having a calling. (QuoteFancy)
4. To truly experience a poem, you need to feel it. A poem is alive; it has a voice. It is a person. Who are they? Why are they? Hearing her words, as she speaks to you, you think and feel certain things. Just as, hearing my words now, you think and feel certain things. Reading poetry is a conversation of feeling between two people. (QuoteFancy)
5. [The producers] asked me if I thought there was enough material there for a novel. And I got one of those full body shivers, I’m sure you know what I mean, that moment when the universe spins you around and forces you to look in a completely different direction. That new perspective was so clear: I’d been trying to shoehorn a novel into the shape of a screenplay. So they hired me to write the book (She Reads)
6. Writing novels is a fundamentally isolated endeavor. Granted, there are a number of people who get a book over the finish line, but at its core, a book is one person’s vision. (She Reads)
7. Weirdly, I do some of my best writing on planes, for some reason. I think it’s being completely unplugged and uninterrupted. (She Reads)

Julia Whelan is an American actress, narrator, and author. In the 2010s, Whelan stepped away from her acting career to become an audiobook narrator. As of August 2025, she has narrated over 600 audiobooks. She started Julia Whelan’s Audiobrary. In 2018, Whelan published her debut novel, My Oxford Year, which Entertainment Weekly called ‘a breathtakingly perfect picture of Oxford’ and ‘a powerfully heartbreaking and life-affirming tribute to love and to choice’. In 2022, she released her sophomore novel, Thank You for Listening. In 2024, filming began on an adaptation of the film My Oxford Year for Netflix. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

Source for image: Author’s Website

by Amanda Patterson

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