As a young boy, Simon Vance received his first reel-to-reel tape recorder while attending the Brighton School of Music and Drama in Brighton, England. He promptly began using it to record funny voices and silly sounds, and he’s never truly stopped.
After studying at Leeds University, he became a newsreader and presenter for BBC Radio 4. During this period, he also discovered a knack for audiobook narration while working for the Talking Book Service of the Royal National Institute for the Blind. Shortly thereafter, Vance moved to California and began cultivating an acting career while dipping his toes into commercial audiobook narration, which soon hit an impressive stride. Since then, he has received more than a dozen Audie Awards and more than 60 Earphones Awards.
Awards aside, Vance is a clear favorite among listeners, with performances ranging from Charles Dickens’s epic serial novels (David Copperfield, Little Doritt, and Nicholas Nickleby, to name a few) to Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, which, at one million words, is 200,000 words longer than The Bible!
Vance’s work on such titles as Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh and Mark Logue and Peter Conradi’s The King’s Speech is full of depth and intelligence, without feeling cold or cerebral. The fervent listener response to his narrations of Brian Staveley’s Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne series, and Frank Herbert’s Dune demonstrate mastery in a variety of fiction series.
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