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Voices to Know

AudioFile's newest showcase of award-winning narrators



EARPHONES REPORT APRIL-JUNE 2024

Find the narrators who are getting the best reviews and coveted Earphones Awards.

AudioFile's updated Talent Guide gives expanded details on the audiobook experience and accomplishments of hundreds of narrators—includes contact information and pseudonyms.

Link directly to reviews and complete profiles of narrators creating exceptional audio.

Catherine Ho

Giving back what the text gives you (connecting to and replicating the words’ feeling) is among the storyteller’s most fundamental performance obligation. Throughout her narration of JUMPNAUTS, 

Catherine Ho honors the author’s emotional intent by unceasingly seeking to organically (truthfully) replicate the narrative’s multiplicity of nuanced emotions. How does she do this, exactly? Perhaps many ways. Among them, by relentless loyalty to the third-person narrator’s chief responsibility: staying inside the head of the character whose point of view the story is being told from, and by discovering that character’s feelings in the moment, just as the character does. That’s storytelling!

Paul Bellantoni

If form influences content, then Paul Bellantoni exemplifies that axiom throughout his narration of THE LADY OF LAKE COMO. In this story of a small Italian village’s inhabitants who navigate life’s vicissitudes during the Second World War, the author’s doleful language and syntax is matched by Bellantoni’s unhurried, albeit finely tuned and distinctive, narration. Listeners are engaged by the sense that the narrator inhabits the psyche of characters he intimately knows, like family. The consequence: Bellantoni’s pace contributes to listeners’ connection by creating that sense of familiarity, as if they, too, inhabit the psyches of people they have somehow always known.

His subject is as important to us as to the author.

Highlights of single-voice narrations getting recent

Earphones Awards:

• Bethan Dixon Bate: THE CRONE OF MIDNIGHT EMBERS
• Raquel Beattie: ROSE/HOUSE
• Darren Eliker: THE VOYAGES OF TRUEBLOOD CAY
• Kimberly Farr: A POETRY HANDBOOK
• Hope Newhouse: TREE. TABLE. BOOK.
• Mack Sanderson: THE BIRDS THAT AUDUBON MISSED
• Gail Shalan: MEDEA
• Elizabeth Wiley: THE INVENTION OF PREHISTORY
• Eunice Wong: MEMORY PIECE

Rebecca Lowman



Remaining consistently connected to the subtext (the narrative’s emotional consequence) is sometimes compromised, especially in literary fiction, where the redolent prose begs narrators to overemphasize ("help") the language, as if the listener won’t feel it on their own. Not the case in THE LIMITS, narrated by Rebecca Lowman, whose unwavering attachment to the subtext is never compromised by artificially "voicing" the words, seductive as they may be. To be sure, Lowman’s interpretation is filled with multi-hued variety that is driven not by helping the words but staying connected to their feeling. In that way, the narrator’s heart and imagination consistently engage that of the listener.

Ralph Lister



Ralph Lister brings SHOGUN, PART ONE to life with a commitment that consistently matches the story’s emotional stakes. Whether it’s narration or dialogue, this vocally robust narrator unflinchingly seizes the stakes’ intensity which acts to draw listeners close to the action, as if they are in its midst. Importantly, the text’s description of events, actions, and things, no matter how ordinary or consequential—even the simple movement of an arm—never causes Lister to drop out (disconnect) from the subtext and simply report what’s described. In so doing, his commitment to engaging listeners is taut from beginning until The End.

Narrators in ensemble narrations are also garnering Earphones Awards:

• Pete Cross: ALL THE WORLD BESIDE
• Kimberly Farr: WITHIN ARM'S REACH
• Tavia Gilbert: THE REAL EDUCATION OF TJ CROWLEY
• Matt Haynes: THE PHOENIX BRIDE
• Cary Hite: A CALAMITY OF SOULS
• Barrie Kreinik: THE QUEEN OF FOURTEENTH STREET
• Kathleen McInerney: AN EVIL HEART
• Cassandra Morris: THE SILENCE & FREE PERIOD
• Michelle H. Lee: A CRANE AMONG WOLVES
• Gilli Messer: WITHIN ARM'S REACH
• Elisabeth Rodgers: THE QUEEN OF FOURTEENTH STREET
• Byron Wagner: LOOK AGAIN

And naturally, AudioFile's GOLDEN VOICE narrators rack up their share of Earphones Awards:

Dion Graham, Johnny Heller, January LaVoy, Robin Miles, Soneela Nankani, Simon Vance

AudioFile's Audiobook Talent & Industry Guide features listings from the best narrators in the industry. Audiobook skills and experience are foremost in this focused resource for audiobook voices.

Thanks to audiobook director Paul Alan Ruben for his contributions to Voices to Know.