AudioFile is thrilled to name Hillary Huber one of our 2025 Golden Voices—our narrator hall of fame and lifetime achievement award. Hillary’s voice is well known to audiobook lovers everywhere: It’s compelling, nuanced, and instantly engaging. With more than 700 audiobooks to her name, she’s brought life to everything from chilling thrillers to intricate literary fiction, including Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet and Lisa Gardner’s Frankie Elkin series.
In this bonus episode, host Jo Reed speaks with Hillary Huber about how she found her way to audiobook narration, the craft behind her performances, and what the Golden Voice recognition means to her.
Partial transcript:
Jo Reed: You've said crime fiction is your favorite genre to narrate. Why is that?
Hillary Huber: I don't know, because I don't like to read it for pleasure, and I don't really like to watch scary shows. I get really scared, but! I don't know if it's because when I'm narrating those books, I'm in control, and I know when the jump scare is coming. Maybe it's that, but I don't know. I have an ability to get to a dark place, and I don't have a lot of pain in my life, but for some reason, trauma and terror and pain are an easy place for me to go to perform. Frivolity, I can do frivolity too, actually. I like that also. But yeah, I've done a lot of memoirs by women who have really had traumatic experiences, and somehow I connect with that, and I like it.
JR: Well, tell us a little bit about Frankie Elkin.
HH: I love Frankie Elkin. She's the greatest character. She's so damaged, that's why I like her. She's a recovered alcoholic, recovering, I guess, alcoholic. She's had some pain in her past, and when we first meet her, she is tetherless. She has no home. She has a backpack with her belongings, and she travels around the world helping to find missing people. She'll read about them in the paper, and it's usually a member from an underprivileged part of our society, somebody who the cops aren't giving resources to locating. And so she’ll infiltrate the community and help to find this missing person. And it's just something within her that makes her do that for no money, no glory, no fame, no nothing, just because it's the right thing to do. So it seems to me that she's trying to heal something within herself, and I hope she doesn't heal it, because then maybe she'd stop and I wouldn't get to narrate her anymore.
JR: She’s so unlikely as a character and totally believable at the same time, if you know what I mean.
HH: Yeah. She really is. She's fearless. I love her.
JR: In ONE STEP TOO FAR, which is book two of Gardner’s Frankie Elkin series, there's a group of eight people who are searching for a body, including a cadaver dog. And basically, there are only two women in the book, Frankie and Luciana, who is the dog's handler. It's very male heavy. And I wonder what the challenges of that is for you as a narrator.
HH: Well, I probably do male voices better than I do female voices, because listen to me, right? Again, if I'm playing the character's personality, there was the dad who was worried and panicked and just had a mission. He was very goal-driven. And then there was the guide who was in control of everything and led the whole expedition. And right there, they already sound a little bit different, but I haven't done anything radical with my voice, right? So I'm playing their intention, and hopefully it's enough.
JR: Audio is such an intimate form of acting—you’re literally in people’s ears. Do you keep that mind when you narrate? And I guess what I’m asking is, how do you decide how big to go with character?
HH: I think that every book will tell you how far you need to go with that. You're doing a crazy Shapeshifter fantasy series, I think you've got a little more leeway in how big you go. But if it's a realistic story, you don't want to take the listener out. You know, at the end of the day, we're not trying to trick anyone into thinking we are a cast, a full cast. It's one person telling this story. It's the oldest art form in the world, isn't it? So as long as we can keep the listener engaged and understanding who's speaking, then I think we're doing a good job. But every book will tell you what you need to do.
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Listen to their full conversation on our Behind the Mic podcast.
Photo by Two Dudes Photo
