June is a great month for so many reasons. Our seasons change, young people step into new adventures, families plan excursions during the welcome summer break. In the world of audiobooks, we celebrate the official Audiobook Month. With eyes and ears on audiobooks, we announce new 2025 Golden Voices, the brilliant stars of the audiobook universe. (Be sure to look at the stunning cover artwork of the print edition of the magazine, by Maine artist Jamie Hogan.)
This June we celebrate Vikas Adam, Kimberly Farr, and Hillary Huber as the new 2025 class of superstar Golden Voices. Each one of these narrators has dedicated years of work in audiobooks and honed their skills in the craft and magic of audiobook storytelling. It’s not just the years, but their attention and focus on their audiobook careers, and the success they achieve across many genres and topics. For countless hours they bend and blend their voices to the stories that authors bring them, teasing out the nuance and drama to give us all exceptional listening.
Our 2025 celebrants join the “Golden 50”—fifty Golden Voice narrators recognized for their excellence since AudioFile’s 1992 launch. I hope you explore the work of each voice actor and can hear why their contributions to the audiobook universe are so important. Each narrator is a chameleon—a mad poet, a prominent historian, a gay ex-cop, a rapacious food critic, a chicken farmer, a 90-year-old widower, a petulant teen, an ordinary mom—each real and imagined character is delivered to us listeners with heart and understanding. The brilliant works by these human voices have soul and can never be replaced.
Why do we care about Golden Voice narrators? They set the standards of excellence for other narrators. Listeners can experience the highest level of storytelling from these narrators. Maybe we can’t always recognize the names, but the proof is in the telling—the excellence of pause, and pace, the beat of storytelling.
You’ll know it when you hear it. Please explore the work of our newest Golden Voices—Vikas, Kimberly, Hillary—and all of the Golden Voice narrators through their audiographies, easily found at the AudioFile website.
Vikas Adam is an Audie Award winner and a sixteen-time nominee, and he has 27 AudioFile Earphones Awards to his credit. In addition to recording audiobooks, he’s on the faculty at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, where he teaches, acting, voice, and character creation. Vikas brings life to his audiobook performances. He says that lived experiences are his greatest source of inspiration, and that he has adored experiencing the lives of the characters in his audiobooks, like those of two very different former police officers: Sami Kierce in Harlan Coben’s NOBODY’S FOOL and Evander Mills in Lev AC Rosen’s LAVENDER HOUSE. He can give a roomful of people completely natural, individualized voices, and he can become a full cast with just his own voice. In fiction like Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s A GREAT COUNTRY, Vikas connects to each character, and so the listener feels that connection as well. Stay tuned for our conversation with Vikas coming to the Behind the Mic podcast later this month.
Kimberly Farr, who has recorded more than 400 titles, brings us into the inner lives of her characters subtly and quietly—she slips in, and there we are. She’s known for astute performances of literary works by Elizabeth Strout (OLIVE KITTERIDGE, MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON), Margaret Atwood, Ann Tyler (CLOCK DANCE) Joan Didion (LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I MEAN), Sylvia Plath, and many more. Poetry, such as Mary Oliver’s collection DEVOTIONS, showcases her gift of narrating each word clearly, with exquisite pacing and pauses. In nonfiction like DEARIE, the biography of Julia Child, Kimberly gives an expressive performance but wisely stops short of imitation. She has appeared on Broadway and has many television appearances to her credit. Our conversation with Kimberly on the Behind the Mic podcast will air later this month.
Hillary Huber is a 20-year veteran of the audiobook industry, and she has recorded more than 800 titles—including multiple Earphones Awards, Audie Award finalists, and AudioFile Best of the Year winners. She brings humor, attitude, and unsurpassed snark to her performances, making her the perfect voice for tough-edged dames of crime fiction like Frankie Elkin in Lisa Gardner’s STILL SEE YOU EVERYWHERE and Margo Angelhart in Alison Brennan’s YOU’LL NEVER FIND ME. Hillary also has great skill with one of the great modern literary sagas, the Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante that start with MY BRILLIANT FRIEND. These audiobooks show off her facility with languages and accents and her softer, emotional humanism. Listen in to Jo Reed’s conversation with Hillary on the Behind the Mic podcast, airing later this week.
Hillary Huber photo by Two Dudes Photo, Vikas Adam photo by Sergio Garcia, Kimberly Farr photo by Robert Kazandjian
