I was looking through the review journals we use to select books, and came across the new Michael Robotham book that is coming out in June, The Wreckage. Whenever I have come across his name, I have wondered how exactly to pronounce it. This time I decided to try and find out, as I have been successful in the past discovering how to pronounce John Lescroart (Les kwah) and Jodi Pecoult (Pekoe).
A quick Google search lead me to quite a variety of sites that provide help in pronouncing author’s names. The first one at Teaching Books is nifty because it includes a number of authors saying their own names (my favorite was Vladimir Radunsky). A great resource, but focused on children’s authors, so I moved on. The next site I tried was Inogolo, a site that provides pronunciation help for names in the arts. Sadly, no entry for Robotham, but Vladimir, John and Jodi were there – and Jodi’s showed that this site also has some audio links. I moved on to Swisseduc.ch. This appears to be a webpage for students in Switzerland, but it is a nice site for a limited number of author names spelled out phonetically and with an audio file of the author as well. I guess Robotham is not on the reading list (nor John, Jodi or Vladimir), so I moved on to Book Browse. What a great site for readers! Well worth the time to browse through and revisit. But I was looking for pronunciations. They have quite a variety, my favorite on this page being Cees Nooteboom. Cool name, and we even have a book by him – will have to try it. But still no Robotham. So I did a direct google – how do you pronounce Robotham. I came across a brief discussion on Facebook, and apparently the problem is there is no single pronunciation, but at least there were some suggestions.
So was I successful in my search? Well, at least I have identified a way to pronounce the name, possibly not the right way, but a way. But the big bonus was coming across this article, a very interesting bit about Robotham’s background as a well-known ghost writer. Interesting what all you discover on the road to an answer.
By the way his background as a ghost writer reminded me of the great movie I saw recently . . .
Movies: Ghost writer
I have found the best way of learning how to correctly pronounce an author's name is by listening to a book they have written. The readers might not know how to pronounce Haverhill (Have-her-hill) but I think they must get the author's name right.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great idea (smacks self in forhead). Speaking of bad pronunciation - I am currently listening to an audio of a Dennis Lehane book and not only is the reader doing a very bad Mass accent (his Russian is pretty good) but he is mispronouncing lots of place names.
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