Since breaking into audiobook narration six years ago, John has recorded over 115 books and magazines for the National Library Service at Talking Books in New York, DuArt Studios, Visual EFX, and at Minuteman Talking Books in Nashua, New Hampshire. Possessing great versatility, John has been assigned a wide variety of genres and styles for NLS: murder mysteries, action adventures, black comedy, historical fiction, westerns, romances, thrillers, and youth literature in fiction; political exposes, histories, popular science, memoir, and self help books in non fiction. Titles include City of Dreams, Dublin Noir, The Steel Wave, The Rising Tide, Nixon and Mao, Blackwater, The Blind Doctor, The Quality of Mercy, The Shadow Patrol, The Future, The Inside Ring, Silken Prey, and the Destroyermen and Malazan Books of the Fallen series.
John has also recorded 15 commercial titles in the Self Development, Sci-Fi and Fantasy, Science and Technology, Religion and Spirituality, History, and Youth Fiction categories for Audible, Recorded Books, Christian Audio and Oasis Audio. Before breaking into audiobook narrating, John worked as a stage actor, in industrial and commercial film and voiceover, and in documentary narration.
With a warm, expressive voice, John has the ability to talk with authority, while at the same time utilizing a conversational, natural delivery, as if the listener were sitting with him in the booth. John is seasoned enough to locate the heart of the piece, reading with a variety of pace, tone and inflection appropriate to its purpose.
Originally a stage and film actor, John also has the acting chops to carry long narratives. A skilled character actor, with a great ear for tone and dialect and a voice flexible enough to convey the broad range of action, John can juggle a dizzying array of characters of both sexes. John finds the line between action and narration, reading from inside the characters’ heads, yet capturing the narrator’s voice in every piece he reads.
When John asked his audiobook coach, Robin Miles, what fiction genre(s) he might be best suited for, her answer was, “Mainstream fiction. You like to tell a good story from the heart.” Give John a good story and he’ll tell it from the heart.
Listen to the interview with John Haag on Books and Beyond, the online chat show for listeners of audio in the National Library Service program for the visually impaired.
Download John Haag’s Biography (Microsoft Word format)