Julia Flynn Siler's Biography

Julia Flynn Siler is the New York Times bestselling author of The House of Mondavi. Her most recent book, Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure, hit the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list shortly after being published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in early 2012.

Julia on the grounds of Iolani Palace in Honolulu, photo by Tracy Wright Corvo

As a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek magazine, Ms. Flynn Siler spent more than two decades in the Europe and the United States, reporting from a dozen countries. She has covered fields as varied as biotechnology, cult wines, and the quest to restore a Hawaiian palace's lost treasures.

A graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Ms. Flynn Siler began her career as a staff correspondent for BusinessWeek, working in the magazine’s Los Angeles and Chicago bureaus. She wrote on everything from White Castle's hamburger "sliders" to turmoil in the futures markets for the New York Times. While holding down a full-time reporting job during the day, she earned an MBA at night from Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

In 1993, she was awarded a fellowship to teach business journalism in Prague, where she was based out of the Center for Independent Journalism, a not-for-profit organization supported in part by the New York Times Foundation. Ms. Flynn Siler then served as a London-based staff correspondent for BusinessWeek, where she was a member of BusinessWeek reporting teams that won a National Magazine Award, a Deadline Club award, as well as other honors.

As a longtime London-based foreign correspondent, she wrote about family business dynasties, millionaire dons at Oxford and Cambridge, and Virgin founder Richard Branson, among other subjects. Towards the end of her years in London, she joined the Wall Street Journal as its European management correspondent. After returning to the U.S., one of the first articles she wrote for the Wall Street Journal was about the turmoil within the Mondavi family’s wine empire. It ran as a front page story in June of 2004.

That story led to her book The House of Mondavi, published by Penguin's Gotham Books in 2007. It was honored as a finalist both for a James Beard Award and a Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished reporting. Ms. Flynn Siler continues to write Page One and Weekend stories for the Wall Street Journal out of its San Francisco bureau.

Ms. Flynn Siler is a member of the San Francisco-based writing group North 24th, whose members have published ten nonfiction books as well as hundreds of articles and essays in major magazines, newspapers and literary journals. She has taught journalism at the University of London's Birkbeck college and has appeared on CNBC, the BBC, National Public Radio, and elsewhere.

She serves on the alumni board of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and volunteers for Guide Dogs for the Blind. She and her family live in Northern California, where they enjoy mountain biking and skiing and are involved in a wide range of community activities.