Narrators

Talking with Edoardo Ballerini

In June 2019, Edoardo 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?

The first thing that surprised me about audiobooks--I came from the film and TV side of things, where I still am active--is now difficult it is. I guess I was naïve when I first started recording things. I was like, “Oh, well, you know, you just read the book, what can be so hard about that?” And then I quickly discovered that it is truly an art form unto itself. I remember, after one of the first books I did, I would go home after the sessions and just pass out, dead tired. I hadn’t really understood just how incredibly difficult this work can be, and how talented the people behind the mic are, across the board. Then the other thing that surprised me on the other side of things is how popular they are. I discovered so quickly that people are just gobbling audiobooks up left and right, and they mean a lot to them.

Tell us about a time that you’ve gotten feedback from a fan.

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from fans over the years, and what has struck me about it is how personal in nature the responses are. And I think the reason for it is that there’s an intimacy to this medium--that you have one voice talking to one listener, and it’s very personal, and it’s in a sense like a private conversation between two people. And it offers something that a lot of other forms of entertainment don’t, and that is this very personal nature, this very intimate relationship between the narrator and the listener. When you’re talking about a film or theater, the productions are much larger, obviously, and there are so many elements going into them, but here we have something very stripped-down and basic, and I think it touches people in a very unique way. People have written me extraordinarily intimate things. One woman wrote me to say that listening to some books I’d recorded helped her get through a divorce. Another woman wrote me to say that as she was preparing for a gallery show--she’s a painter--she was listening to my books, and now when she looks at the paintings, she sees and hears my voice in them, which I thought was extraordinary, that she’d taken my work and put it into her work, and they’d sort of fused together in her mind. And you get a lot of these responses from people, and then, as the narrator, you feel this greater responsibility. And so it has actually changed my approach over the years-- it has become a much more personal and intimate thing for me as well.

What helps you achieve an emotional connection to a book and the characters?

I’ve always said that the narrator is first in service to the author and the book. We’re coming at it after it has been written, and so we’re coming at it to now present it in a new form to listeners. Over the years, as I’ve started to understand that a lot of people are listening and not reading (we can have that debate whether listening is reading another time!), it made me realize the gravity of it all, and it’s helped me connect to material more. It’s just sort of opened it up more and allowed me to get deeper into it in a way that I haven’t previously.

�Interview with Edoardo Ballerini