AudioFile magazine has named the three winners of its annual Golden Voice awards, which honors voice actors who have made significant contributions to audiobook publishing. The recipients are Kevin R. Free, Marin Ireland, and Nicholas Boulton.
The Golden Voice awards are announced each June, which is Audiobook Month. Interviews with the 2023 Golden Voices will be available in the June/July 2023 print and digital issues of the magazine and on the AudioFile website, and will air on the magazine's Behind the Mic podcast.
“For many listeners, an audiobook by a Golden Voice narrator assures exceptional listening,” AudioFile founder and editor Robin Whitten said in a statement. “This year’s three Golden Voice narrators have superb performance skills, are keenly attuned to their authors, and are practiced in many genres and styles.”
Boulton is a multi-award-winning audiobook narrator, frequent video game voice actor, and experienced stage, screen, and radio actor from the U.K. who has narrated or performed in more than 100 audiobooks. His screen credits include Game of Thrones, Shakespeare in Love, and Doctor Who, and he has performed several times with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has been awarded 23 AudioFile Earphones Awards and three SOVAS Voice Arts Awards, and been nominated five times for Audie Awards.
Free has narrated more than 450 audiobooks since 2001, including Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries series, Walter Dean Myers’s The Cruisers, The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor, and Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry by Brad Leithauser. He is the artistic director of Mile Square Theatre in Hoboken, N.J.
Ireland won an Audie Award for best female narrator in 2020, and is a Theatre World and Obie Award winner and a former Tony Award nominee. Her film credits include The Boogeyman, Hell or High Water, and The Irishman, and her television credits include The Umbrella Academy, Y: The Last Man, Girls, and Homeland.
Past Golden Voice winners include Adjoa Andoh, Scott Brick, Dion Graham, George Guidall, J.D. Jackson, January LaVoy, Bahni Turpin, Julia Whelan, and Emily Woo Zeller.
