[3] Birmingham's only stint of full-time employment was as a researcher at the Australian Department of Defence but he has worked for the television program A Current Affair.

[5][6] Birmingham was first published in Semper Floreat, the student newspaper at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, writing a series of stories featuring a fictional character named Commander Harrison Biscuit.

[7] He won a young writers award for the Independent, which was edited by Brian Toohey and wrote a number of articles for Rolling Stone and Australian Penthouse magazines.

In 1994, Birmingham released his sharehouse living memoir He Died with a Felafel in His Hand,[8] which has since been turned into a play,[9] film, and a graphic novel.

[10] His other works include The Search for Savage Henry, a crime novel featuring the character Harrison Biscuit, How To Be A Man, a semi-humorous guide to contemporary Australian masculinity and Off One's Tits, a collection of essays and articles previously published elsewhere.

He is also a regular contributor Archived 10 August 2009 at the Wayback Machine to The Monthly, an Australian national magazine of politics, society and the arts.

In September 2006, Birmingham wrote a piece in The Australian lambasting Germaine Greer for an article she had written in The Guardian about Steve Irwin shortly after his death.

[19] In 2004 he published the alternative history Weapons of Choice, the first in the Axis of Time trilogy, a series of Tom Clancy-like techno-thrillers.

The series tells of a multinational peacekeeping force from the early 21st century being taken back in time to 1942, where its presence completely changes the course of World War II.

The ABC reported in 2006 that there were two new Birmoverse books in the works, one set shortly after the end of the war, and another in the alternative 1980s, said to feature a dashing young RAF pilot: Richard Branson.

Kirkus Reviews gave a very positive review for The Cruel Stars and called it "Frenetic action viewed in a black fun-house mirror" for its narrative that "canters along at a good clip, dashing off insane cannibals, exploding warships, detached heads, and cartwheeling body parts, with occasional transfusions of dark comic relief.

John Birmingham’s latest novel, The Cruel Stars, balances all of those things, making readers laugh out loud even as it pulls them through an intergalactic battle for the soul of humanity.

[27] Writing for FanFiAddict, its reviewer called The Cruel Stars series utterly fantastic and wrote "Birmingham really finds new ways to keep the plot fresh and explore different, strange scenarios despite the crew being on a ship in the void that is space.