Interview With Ruth Urquhart

Ruth Urquhart is a Scottish actor who’s done voice work across a wide variety of genres, including audiobooks, commercials, animation, and video games. I’ve loved her work ever since I heard her narration of Lola Keeley’s sapphic romance A Roll in the Hay, and was delighted when she was available to narrate The Woman from the Waves.

Ruth is a lovely person as well as a consummate professional, and I wanted readers to have a chance to get to know her! She was gracious enough to grant me an interview in which she revealed some tricks of the audiobook trade. Without further ado…

Tell us a little about yourself and how you got into audiobook narration.

I grew up in Scotland and have lived in Ireland and England before coming back to the lovely Galloway region of Scotland, where I live with my partner and two teens (and two very scruffy rescue dogs and three cats!). I’ve been an actor forever and that’s what I trained in, but when my kids came along it became more difficult just to go away on tour so it made sense to do something from home…voice work was the obvious choice, and to my surprise I found there was actually a lot more work available than for a jobbing theatre actor.


What do you wish listeners knew about audiobook narration?

I guess there’s a bit of a misconception that it’s just “reading” when it is actually one of the most difficult areas of voice work. You’ve got to consider pace, emotion, and character, all while standing in effectively a padded cell talking to yourself for hours on end! You have to love books and storytelling, which fortunately I do.


Most sapphic books feature only one narrator. When you're the only narrator, how do you create distinct voices for the characters?

This is something that is really important to me, as if the listener cannot decipher who is speaking then that can ruin the story. In good books (like yours!) the characters are well defined, so that makes it much easier…I have had my fair share of books that perhaps don’t sketch characters as well, and where they are are all from the same place so I can’t rely on accent changes. Then it can be looking for any clues in the text that might mean a character is, for example, a bit gruffer or hesitant. Or I use different voice attributes such as a nasal voice, husky, etc.


What do you do when you misspeak or make a mistake while recording?

Stop, swear loudly, and then put my cursor at the start of the sentence where the mistake is and re-record. I use “punch and roll” software, which means once you’ve placed your cursor where the mistake is and hit record, it will play you the last few words of the previous sentence so you can get back into it. However, it is amazing how when I am perhaps getting tired I can insert words without even realising I’ve done it, and I only know when I get my corrections back from the proofer that I‘ve said something nonsensical!


On average, and including any edits, how many hours does it take you to record a book?

This varies massively. On average, these days it takes me two hours to produce one hour of finished audio, although some books that are complicated—e.g., a non-fiction book that has lots of strange place names, or a fantasy book with its own made-up language—can be more like three hours to one. When I started narrating twelve years ago, it was more like six hours for every one hour recorded!

The Woman from the Waves features both Scottish and American characters. How do you capture different accents? What are some resources you use?

I’m lucky as I grew up in Scotland with English parents, so I was always changing my accent according to whom I was speaking. That has given me a good ear for accents. YouTube videos are useful to hear how people are speaking in their local accent, and if I know someone who has an accent that I don’t know that well I sometimes will ask them to read a couple of lines for me so I can listen to it.


You’ve narrated books by other sapphic authors like Lola Keeley, Wendy Hudson, Charlotte Anne Hamilton, and more. What have you enjoyed most about narrating sapphic romance? Do you have plans to narrate more sapphic books?

As a passionate ally of the LGBTQ community, I am always pleased to get sapphic titles. I always feel more connection to the author because of it, and I love the readership as they are generally always so positive...so YES, of course I will be narrating more sapphic books!

You can learn more about Ruth and her work on her website.