Étienne Vasseur

aÉtienne Vasseur grew up in Villedieu-les-Poêles, where bells have been cast for eight hundred years and the whole town can hear a cracked note. He spent fifteen years in radio, first editing, then reading columns and documentary serials. He came to audiobooks through the serial and never looked for a way out. He lives in Honfleur.

He reads nineteenth-century novels, French and Russian above all. What interests him in a text from that period is the length of the sentences: they stand up if you let them breathe, and collapse as soon as you cut them into pieces to go faster. He refuses to build characters by changing voice, and simply shifts the pace and the stress slightly from one line of dialogue to the next.

He records in a room lined with books, which absorbs well enough, and works in the morning, before the harbour wakes up. He says you can hear a chapter recorded after six in the evening. He works with Itamde on the French-language Voctale catalogue.