Author or Actor: Who Should Narrate Audiobooks?

Who’s the better narrator for an audiobook: the author of the book or a professional voice actor?

Trick question. The answer is both, and/or, it depends.

Let’s leave nonfiction out of this discussion because I find that just about any personal writing will benefit from the author’s literal voice, whether it’s in memoir-form, personal essay, or reporting in which the author is present. That’s why I begged my publisher to let me narrate my own essay collection, and why, from celebrities to comedians (Alison Leiby’s new one is so good!) to journalists (let Patrick Radden Keefe do whatever he wants!), I tend to enjoy author-narrated performances more.

But fiction is a little thornier. Not all fiction writers are actors and that is more than okay because voice actors exist and many of them are wonderful. In fact, voice actors are very important. In order to buy into such an assertion you must believe, despite what AI companies like to say, that narrating books is an art form and should be treated as such.

More than that, you must believe that human interpretation of a text matters. This is a big reason why fiction matters. It’s not just about the words themselves; it’s about how context and reader experience can change the resonance of those words, and why readers can find different meanings in the same work. The performance of a text by a skilled narrator can tweak those meanings even more.

Dion Graham’s performance of the books in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy is one of the all-time great narrator performances, so I’ll use it as a case study. Graham uses subtly different voices with different cadences to portray the series’s wide cast of characters, and taken cumulatively, he evokes a very particular time and place—Harlem in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Not to mention that Whitehead’s writing is so propulsive that without Graham embodying the characters and occasionally slowing down to pointedly say a particular line, I likely would have read too quickly and missed out on much of the trilogy’s humor.

There is a unique pleasure in hearing a novelist read their work aloud.

But it’s not just Graham. January LaVoy works in a variety of different genres and brings vigor to each one. So do personal favorites like Mara Wilson, Rebecca Lowman, and Julia Whelan, and so many others. I particularly love when a narrator works on enough of an author’s oeuvre that their voices become entangled in a pleasing way. I can’t think of Mona Awad’s dark fantastical novels without hearing Sophie Amoss’s voice, and Roger Clark’s accent work is intimately tied to my understanding of Tana French’s Cal Hooper series.

We can count celebrity narrators here too, with the caveat that your average audiobook narrator lacks the financial stability of your average Hollywood star. But there’s a lot to love: Jeremy Irons narrating Brideshead, Revisited or Marisa Tomei narrating the English translation of Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults. A bonus: Did you know that Matt Bomer narrated the 10th anniversary edition of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life?

But there is a unique pleasure in hearing a novelist read their work aloud, their craft decisions become crystallized. Both lesser known (so far) authors and legends alike have done it well. Recently I’ve loved Mariam Rhamani’s reading of her 2025 debut, Liquid, and Jordy Rosenberg’s bravura interpretation of his latest novel, Night Night Fawn. A special mention for Ann Patchett: she had Meryl Streep narrate Tom Lake, and Tom Hanks did The Dutch House, but Patchett’s own reading of her latest novel, Whistler, is equally exquisite.

My all-time favorite is when an eccentric or singular type of author reads their work and a text you thought you knew makes so much more sense. I’m thinking of Donna Tartt’s reading of The Secret History, her Southern accent emphasizing how out of place her main character is in his New England liberal arts college. The main character’s questionable decisions in Miranda July’s All Fours make way more sense when the author is telling the story. And there is no one other than Bret Easton Ellis who should ever read The Shards: the paranoid ramblings of his narrator make the most sense coming out of his own mouth. I have no idea how the show based on the book will be, but I can say for sure that I was locked in for a 23-hour audiobook.

I also need you to know that Toni Morrison narrated all of her own audiobooks and they are as exceptional as they sound.

There are so many great choices for audiobook narrators. Unless you’re visually impaired, in which case I have absolutely no basis to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do to make the world more accessible, the only bad choice is going with an AI narrator. Reading and listening to fiction is fundamentally about accessing one’s humanity. We simply cannot outsource it to machines.