Helen Lloyd’s background is acting. She trained at The Guildhall School of Music and Drama and spent fifteen years as a professional actor, mainly in theatre. Highlights include playing at the National Theatre at the Old Vic in The Alchemist and in Jonathan Miller’s production of King Lear with Michael Hordern, playing the title role in Miss Julie at the Roundhouse Studio and Mollie Ralston, the female lead in year 29 of The Mousetrap at St Martin’s Theatre in London.

In the early 1980s Helen moved into television as a presenter and continuity announcer for ITV Central — and recorded her first audiobooks — thankfully no longer available! Personal reinvention became a necessity as by now she had a growing family, so she stepped behind the camera, becoming a producer and director of factual programmes while at the same time building a freelance career as a voice actor — which turned out to be a very smart move! Twenty-three years later, she took redundancy and the rest is history.

Helen has recorded 150 audiobooks to date, all but five recorded in her own studio. She records for Harper Collins, Penguin Random House and Audible Studios in both the US and the UK; for Blackstone, Disney Publications, Macmillan Audio, Brilliance Audiobooks, Hachette, Dreamscape, Findaway, and Spoken Realms in the US; and for UK imprints including Bonnier, Rosa, Lamplight Audio, Whole Story Audiobooks, Ukemi Audiobooks, Ulverscroft, Isis and Quercus. She also produces and directs audiobooks independently and in association with Raconteurs Audio LLP.

Three Earphone Awards, and an Audie nomination later, and having trained all of BeeAudio’s UK based narrators when they first opened up in the UK in 2012, Helen felt confident that she could garner fifty years’ of knowledge and experience into a bespoke, meaningful coaching course for audiobook narrators, and she has been running this successfully since 2018. Helen coaches regularly for Voiceover Kickstart, and has been ‘A Professional Ear’ with The Audiobook Publishers’ Association. Working independently, she coaches and directs experienced narrators and actors, and works with authors who are narrating their own books.