Caroline Bakker

In 2009, at twenty, Caroline Bakker left the Netherlands for a short visit to Australia and never quite left. She stayed to study at the University of the Sunshine Coast, then built a life there — first in Queensland, later in Melbourne — training as a Health and Fitness Trainer before discovering the thing that would define the next chapter of her work: mindfulness, and the deep, often-overlooked connection between body and mind.

In 2021, that discovery became Meditations by Amazon Warrior, launched in Melbourne and built on a simple idea — that a busy mind deserves real rest, not just advice. It's since grown into a YouTube channel with thousands of followers and a Spotify audience of over 500,000 listeners.

Then came motherhood, and with it, postpartum depression, adrenal fatigue, and a diagnosis of PMDD that finally explained years of what she'd quietly carried alone. By 2024 — sleep-deprived, raising a toddler born in 2022, now living in Dubai — she learned the fuller picture: she had ADHD too, and it had been shaping her PMDD all along. That year she wrote her first book. Four more followed, each one turning what she was learning about her own mind into something other people could use.

Fiction was never part of the plan.

But living through a world that felt increasingly frightening — war, division, an endless scroll of negativity — Caroline found herself wanting somewhere gentler to go, somewhere social media couldn't reach. When she couldn't find it, she built it: a hidden lane that reveals itself only to people who need it, with short chapters, soft endings, and no cliffhangers — written the way she'd write a meditation, to leave you calmer than it found you.

*The Apothecary on Wattle Lane* is her debut novel and the first of eight interconnected books.

Follow Caroline here for updates on the series, or find her guided meditations on YouTube, Spotify, and Insight Timer.