The creators of the audiobook for this edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have considerable expertise in bringing Joyce’s voice to life. UCD’s Professor Gerardine Meaney and Athena Media previously collaborated with Barry McGovern, the well-known Irish actor, on the podcast series and an iPhone app based on Joyce’s short story The Dead. In 2016, Sam McGovern joined this team to create a full-length audio version of Joyce’s first novel.
Rather than featuring a single voice, this reading of the novel creates a dialogue between Joyce’s mature voice and that of his younger, remembered self. As the project team note:
“We wanted to have a young voice for Stephen himself – after all this is Joyce’s own coming of age novel with a strong trace of his own life and experience in it”.
This was achieved through the dialogue of Barry McGovern’s mature voice and the youthful voice of Sam McGovern, who narrated the 2015 Dublin stage adaptation of the novel and is a former UCD Ad Astra scholar.
The interplay of these two voices in this reading of the 1916 text represents a unique contemporary interpretation of Joyce’s coming-of-age novel, whose themes remain as raw and as relevant today as they did upon their original publication.
Listen to the audiobook on Soundcloud, download the complete audiobook, or explore the novel chapter by chapter.