AustLit

Julia Baird is an Australian political journalist, television commentator and writer from Sydney. She was educated at Ravenswood School of Girls, and holds a PhD in history from the University of Sydney (awarded 2001); she was also awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity by the University of Divinity in 2018. She has been a research fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

She is the author of Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians (Scribe, 2004) and Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire (Random House, 2016); the latter was longlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize and the Walkley Book Award and shortlisted for the 2017 ABIA Award for Biography of the Year, and the 2018 Douglas Stewart Prize (NSW Premier's Literary Awards).

In 2020, Baird released Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder, and Things that Sustain You When the World Goes Dark, an investigation into internal happiness: it won the Indie Award for non-fiction for 2021 and was won Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year at the Booksellers Choice Awards.