James A. Gillies

James A. Gillies has been a familiar voice across BBC television and radio for nearly a quarter of a century. He has worked as an actor, continuity announcer, program narrator, and newsreader, even reading the Shipping Forecast. Trained at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire in the 1970s, he taught speech and drama and theater studies for much of the next decade, developing many of the country's first school examinations in the subject. Finding himself in demand as a professional voice actor along the way, he was recruited by the BBC in the early 1990s. In 2013, he left in order to concentrate on his favorite part of the job: performance and, in particular, storytelling. Since then he has been in demand worldwide, recording generally one audiobook per month, voicing television ads in the U.K., U.S., Russia, Scandinavia, and the Middle East, and providing voice tracks for television, film, gaming, and on Ulineprojects. James lives with his wife, a former orchestral violist turned book editor, and two Norwegian Forest cats in the picturesque old weaving village of Kilbarchan in the beautiful West of Scotland.