Christine Rendel

What was the first audiobook you performed?

Lake Tahoe Voices: A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird

What title or series are you best known for?

Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy

If a listener wanted to get to know your work, which of your audiobooks would you point them to?

Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy
The Girls by John Bowen
Six Little Words by Sally Page
The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
The Daughters of Yalta by Catherine Grace Katz

What do you always have in the booth?

Water, throat spray and lozenges. Small, rubber squeezy dog for stress relief. Scooter, my small dog and Pomadoro adviser for time management, when I’m not actually recording, of course. Hammer, Phillips and flat-blade screwdrivers for emergency exit…just in case.

How did you come to performing audiobooks?

I went to Abu Dhabi from the UK as a young midwife. Later, while waiting for my US Green Card and a move to the Bay Area, I worked on local radio. I would return to the UAE and continue my nursing career, but while living in Berkely that year, I volunteered at the drama department of KPFA public radio. By night, I worked in a psychiatric hospital. On my breaks, I narrated a chapter of a British mystery on my old UHER recorder and each morning would deliver my reel to the radio station to be played that night. Technically, it was my first audiobook and, happily, no trace of it will exist. Years later and settled in New York, I took an audiobook class and made a demo. Brad Hill (then at Zondervan) hired me for the first of several books and gave me my start in audiobook narration. Just a book or two a year for many years until I finally retired from healthcare.

Anything else you’d like a listener to know?

I am, and always was, a story teller. An imaginative believer in other realms and peoples and adventures, I was a creative. As a child, I would tell my stories to anyone who would listen, especially my two small brothers, huddled together while I recounted the story my Kindergarden teacher had read to my class earlier that day. Enid Blyton. The Far Away Tree. Magical.
I believe we are all creatives, and that we have talents and potential across multiple genres. In my long and varied nursing career, I found enormous fulfillment in caring for others, being of service to individuals and communities and helping people navigate health challenges, and in teaching new generations of nurses.
And so in my career as an audiobook narrator, I care for every precious audiobook I’m trusted and privileged to narrate, caring that I do my very best for the listener, for the author whose ‘baby’ I’m holding, and for the publisher team who’ve hired me.

We are all in service to one another in life. As a healthcare professional, an audiobook narrator, an actor and writer, a caregiver, and a gardener, I’m so grateful to have had so many wonderful opportunities to be of service and to reap the wonderful rewards of doing something that I love with passion and care.