About Rafael Sabatini
Known as "The Last of the Great Swashbucklers," Rafael Sabatini was an Italian-born author whose two lifelong passions-the demand for justice and the desire for tolerance-were common themes in his novels. His best-known works include The Sea-Hawk, Scaramouche, and Captain Blood, all of which were made into films. Sabatini was born in 1875 in the small town of Jesi, Italy. His English mother and Italian father were both well-known opera singers. They traveled extensively, so they sent Rafael to live in England until he was seven. Rafael then lived in Portugal and Milan with his parents until he was sent to school in Switzerland. He was a voracious reader and became proficient in four languages. At age seventeen, his father sent him to Liverpool to work as a translator. Sabatini began writing romances at the age of twenty, and his short fiction was published in a number of national magazines. In 1905, he quit his translator job to devote himself to writing full time, producing a book a year. That same year he married a daughter of a well-to-do Liverpool paper merchant, and four years later they had a son, Rafael-Angelo. Sabatini became a British citizen during World War I and worked in the British Intelligence as a translator. In the 1920s, with the publication of the international bestsellers Scaramouche and Captain Blood, he became an overnight success. In 1927, Rafael was devastated by the death of their only child, who was killed in an automobile accident. He fell into a deep depression, wrote very little, divorced his wife, and suffered financially from the Great Depression. However, in 1931 life improved when he moved outside London to Wye and remarried at age sixty. In his later years, he spent his time writing, fishing, and skiing in Switzerland, where he died in 1950.
About Cate Barratt
Cate Barratt is an established Canadian voice artist with years of experience and an instantly recognizable warm, mellow voice. She and Linda Barrans have collaborated on a number of all-female recordings of the Sherlock Holmes stories, with Linda playing Watson to Cate’s Sherlock.
About Amy Soakes
Amy Soakes is an Australian voice actor with over twenty years of experience both in performing and production. She has produced over eight hundred video segments and voiced over a thousand television shows, corporate videos, training programs, and commercials. An expert in utilizing accents, she has been narrating audiobooks for more than four years.
About Robin Siegerman
Robin Siegerman trained as an actor in NYC and Toronto, Canada. She trained as an audiobook narrator with coaches Sean Pratt, Joel Froomkin, and Dawn Harvey. In 2018 she was nominated for Best International Voiceover at the One Voice Awards in London, England, for the documentary voice-over in HarrysStory.ca. In 2019 she won Best Corporate Training Voice Over Artist by CV Magazine. In 2021 she won an Earphones Award from AudioFile magazine for A Son at the Front, by Edith Wharton, and was again nominated for a One Voice Award for the audiobook Rosedale in Love, by Lev Raphael, a retelling of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.
Robin grew up in Montreal speaking English and French, so she developed an ear for language and accents at an early age. She enjoys bringing this to her audiobook narration and enhancing the stories. With an additional background as an internationally award-winning interior designer, author of Renovation Bootcamp: Kitchen, and conference speaker, she loves to "make movies for the ears." In her spare time, you can find her surrounded by a bevvy of senior rescue dogs, singing with her a capella ensemble in Toronto, or playing board games with friends and family.
About David Stifel
David Stifel was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. Bitten early by the acting bug, he studied his craft at the Yale School of Drama. After graduation, he found himself in the usual array of interesting day jobs such as casino porter at Lake Tahoe, ESL teacher in Iran, and Egypt, and video game programmer in the Atari/Intellivision era. Concurrently he worked in films and TV shows for such directors as Steven Spielberg (Minority Report), Danny Boyle (A Life Less Ordinary), and Joel Schumacher (The Number 23).
David entered the audiobook field in 2011, when he launched a long-term podcast of serializations of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Today he is a multi-award-winning narrator with more than 125 audiobooks to his credit.
His growing catalog of audiobooks is strong on thrillers, horror, sci-fi, and mysteries. David's rich baritone voice also lends itself very well to nonfiction memoirs and history-popular and academic. His classical acting training makes him very strong with heightened literary language. Pegged as a "character actor" from youth, his facility with numerous characters is frequently praised by reviewers and listeners.
About Marty Krz
Marty Krz is an actor, musician, film maker, and audiobook narrator, located in Philadelphia, USA.
About Russell Gold
Russell Gold has reported on energy regularly in The Wall Street Journal since 2002. His coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was honored with a Gerald Loeb Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Austin, Texas.
About Melissa Green
With a background in interactive theatre and voice, Melissa Green has over thirty audiobooks on the market. These audiobooks include historical fiction, mystery, classics, romance, LGBTQ+, psychological horror, memoirs, and children’s book titles. Melissa was born in the Upper Midwest of the US and currently resides in the Pacific Northwest.
