Partly Written in Nagasaki: Congratulations, Sharon, on Your New Book
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Digital Communications at Work, co-authored by 2025 residency participant Sharon O'Dea, is now in bookstores worldwide — and Nagasaki appears in its acknowledgements. A thank-you note from our team, going the other way.
Last autumn, Sharon O'Dea arrived in Nagasaki as one of 25 digital nomads from 15 countries in our first residency. She spent the month the way she spends most of her working life: thinking hard about how organisations communicate. Between coworking sessions, study tours, and long conversations with local businesses, she was quietly writing a book.
That book is now real, and you can hold it.
Digital Communications at Work: Designing Channels for Employee Engagement and Experience, co-authored by Sharon O'Dea and Jonathan Phillips and published by Kogan Page, is available from bookstores worldwide from July 3, and in the US from July 28. It is a practical guide for internal communications managers, HR business partners, and workplace leaders — the frameworks, tools, and real-world examples behind digital channels that actually work.
Sharon thanks our team, her fellow participants, and the local business community for "welcoming and sharing their perspectives on communication, collaboration and the future of work."
During the residency, Sharon described her five weeks here as "a group of strangers slowly becoming a little community." That sentence has stayed with our team ever since — it captures what we hope this program does at its best. Seeing Nagasaki woven into a book that will sit on desks in offices around the world is a quiet, lasting version of the same idea: people come here to live and work for a while, and something of this place travels onward with them.
So this post is our acknowledgements page, going the other way. Thank you, Sharon, for choosing Nagasaki as a place to think and write. Thank you for representing what a digital nomad can bring to a region: expertise, curiosity, and generosity with both. And congratulations to you and Jonathan on the launch.
You can find the book at your favourite bookstore, or start here: Buy Digital Communications at Work
Perhaps a future book is waiting for its author to find Nagasaki. Applications for the 2026 residency are open through Thursday, July 31. Live Where Histories Cross.