Narrators

���Talking with Bahni Turpin�

In June 2019, Bahni was inducted as a Golden Voice, AudioFile's lifetime achievement honor for audiobook narrators.

What has surprised you the most about your work in audiobooks?

Well, it’s all been sort of a surprise. When I first started, another actress that I was in a play with told me that Random House was having auditions for people to read books on tape, as they were then called. I went out there, and Dan Musselman and Janet Stark gave me a piece of copy to read. It was many months before they called me to read my first audiobook, and that was A PIECE OF CAKE, by Cupcake Brown. Cassandra Campbell directed me, and she basically taught me how to do it. She would tell me when to take a break--every 30 pages or so, you want to stop, pace yourself, rest your voice for a minute. I liked it, and for years, I only worked with Random House. It was a little windfall whenever I got this work, a little extra. It wasn’t something that I was actively pursuing or trying to grow a business out of. Finally, one day Cassandra again said to me, have you reached out to any of the other publishers? And I had won a few Earphones Awards by this time--I may have even won an Audie, because the first Audie that I won was for THE HELP. And this stuff kind of continued to come to me, and Cassandra asked me, had I reached out to any other publishers; I said no. She said, well, I recommended you to Blackstone. And then I started working with Blackstone, and over the years it has kind of snowballed, but I’m just always surprised at the reach of this, because it’s not something I trained specifically for. It’s not something I that I spent a lot of time pursuing; it just seems to keep coming. So it’s all a surprise.

Tell us about the emotional connection you achieve with your audiobooks.

I am an actress, that is what I do-- I re-create human emotion. So that I am trained for, and it’s pretty easy for me, when the writing is good, to feel with the character. It just happens. It’s not like preparing to do a play or a film--it’s not like I do all this character research and try to walk and talk and move like the character. But it’s very intimate--you’re inside somebody’s life, and it’s harder not to be affected by it than it is to be affected. It’s mostly intuitive work for me.

What’s your favorite genre to narrate?

I like fiction, first and foremost, and of course most of what I read is female-driven, mostly people of African descent. However, I really loved the Stacia Cane books that I read, and that character was not African-American. I just adored those books. I like historical fiction, but I recently had one that I didn’t like so much. I felt like the author took a little too much liberty with the fictionalization of the story. I love things that have some kind of magic in them, but I also love history. I get a chance to learn a lot doing this, and even though nonfiction is not my favorite, I’ve read some amazing nonfiction books. Like THE CHILDREN by David Halberstam, about the Civil Rights movement, it was a long, long, long book, and so much information that I didn’t know about the Civil Rights movement. I love all of it, really--what I don’t like is really academic nonfiction. THE HATE U GIVE is a very comfortable genre for me, that kind of urban teen. But all books are not created equal! That’s Angie Thomas-- Angie Thomas is brilliant. All of them aren’t as good as THE HATE U GIVE or O THE COME UP. My favorite genre is really great writing--that’s what makes the book good. Sometimes, if a book isn’t that great, the audiobook can make it better. But if you start with a good book, it’s awesome.
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AudioFile Interview, 2010—"It's lovely to be read to, isn't it?"