James Whitcombe
Former BBC Radio 4 producer · London · Lectures & Documentary
This week's pick: "The 1938 Oxford Lectures on Consciousness" — 14 sessions, remastered from the original acetate discs.
An Open Audio Archive
The 47 editors behind the catalog.
Every playlist on MP3Slovo is built by a named human curator — not an algorithm, not a mood board. Meet the literary editors who turn 184,000 recordings into a library worth listening to.
47.8M listening sessions in 2024 →
Lead Fiction Editor · Prague
Hana Bartošová
Hana joined MP3Slovo in 2016 as a freelance reader and now oversees the entire fiction shelf — translated novels, classic short stories, and the contemporary fiction slate from 38 partner libraries. Her weekly dispatch, The Long Sentence, is read by 84,000 subscribers.
This month's pick
The Trains of Childhood
"Hlinka's memoir of interwar Moravia, read in his own unhurried voice, is the kind of audiobook I keep returning to. I pair it with his 1962 Paris lecture on rural memory for a quiet weekend."
Listen to the playlist →
The Bench
Twelve editors, twelve specialties.
A representative slice of the 47-person editorial team. Each name links to their full archive of curated playlists.
Adaeze Okonkwo
Linguist & oral historian · Lagos · African Languages & Oral Literature
This week's pick: Yoruba folktales from the 1972 University of Ife field recordings, fully restored.
Lars Eriksson
Former Royal Library of Sweden cataloger · Stockholm · Children's & Young Adult
This week's pick: Astrid Lindgren reading her own unpublished 1969 Christmas stories, from the family archive.
Priya Raman
Poet & translator · Bengaluru · Poetry & Spoken Verse
This week's pick: Six hours of Tagore read by the poet's grand-niece, recorded 1986, restored last month.
Marco Bellini
Theology lecturer · Bologna · Sermons & Sacred Rhetoric
This week's pick: Dominican homilies from a 1973 LP set, transferred and indexed scene-by-scene.
Mei-Ling Tanaka
Cognitive scientist · Kyoto · Science & Long-Form Lectures
This week's pick: Her own 22-part series on attention research, recorded for the MP3Slovo open lectures project.
Helmut Krause
Philosophy professor, emeritus · Heidelberg · Continental Philosophy
This week's pick: The full 1961 Gifford Lectures on time, in the original speaker's voice.
Kofi Mensah
Radio dramatist · Accra · Drama & Radio Plays
This week's pick: Three lost BBC World Service drama adaptations, recovered from the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation tape vault.
Saoirse Ní Mhurchú
Historian & archivist · Dublin · History & Eyewitness Testimony
This week's pick: Oral histories from the 1973 Oral History Project at UCD, freshly digitized.
Tomás Reyes
Polyglot & teacher · Mexico City · Language Learning & Listening Method
This week's pick: A 30-day slow-listening path through Chilean Spanish, drawn from archival newsreel narration.
Dr. Yvonne Mbeki
Accessibility consultant · Cape Town · Accessibility & Screen-Reader Friendly Cuts
This week's pick: Twelve novels re-cut with extended pauses and chapter announcements for screen-reader users.
Petr Havelka
Audio engineer & archivist · Prague · Restoration & The Hidden Archive
This week's pick: The Czech National Library's 1948 folk-music field tapes, de-noised and gaplessly indexed.
Showing 12 of 47 editors. See the full roster and follow your favorites →
How It Works
A weekly practice, not a feed.
Every editor on the MP3Slovo bench keeps a public notebook and a published playlist. Each week, they propose a slate of three to seven titles from the 184,000-item archive — sometimes a single restored recording, sometimes a paired lecture-and-reading set, sometimes a thirty-day listening path. A second editor reads the proposal against the rest of the shelf, and the picks go live on Monday morning, tagged with the curator's name and a short note explaining the choice.
Playlists refresh every Monday and never silently reshuffle. If you follow an editor — a free action that requires no account — you will see their new picks as a single feed and can browse their back catalog down to the first post in 2016. Listeners can also propose a recording for an editor's attention through the For Creators page; serious suggestions are reviewed within two weeks, and editors publish a short reply on the recording's page when they accept or decline.
The editorial team is funded by MP3Slovo's ad-supported tier and by partner-library contributions — none of the curators are paid by the publishers whose work they recommend, and all notes are signed. There are no algorithmic reorderings layered on top of an editor's list. What the curator publishes is what you hear.
Begin Listening
Step inside through an editor's door.
Pick a curator whose taste you trust. Start with their current playlist. The archive will still be here when you want to wander.
Questions
What listeners ask us most.
How do I follow an editor?
Open any editor profile in the roster and tap Follow. No account is required — the follow is stored as a small file on your device, and you can export it as an RSS feed at any time. Following an editor sends their Monday note to your inbox if you add an email address; otherwise, it appears in your browser's local list.
How often do the playlists change?
Each editor publishes a fresh slate every Monday at 09:00 Prague time. Back catalogs are permanent and never deleted — a playlist from March 2019 will still be there, in the same order, when you go looking for it. Seasonal editors (Advent, Lent, summer reading) run their themed cycles in parallel with their weekly practice.
Can I pitch a new curator to the team?
Yes — use the For Creators page and choose Editorial candidacy from the form. We add roughly four new curators a year, drawn from listeners, archivists, and creators. A short note on what beat you would cover, plus one or two sample picks from the existing archive, is enough to begin the conversation.
Who pays the editors?
The 47 curators are salaried staff of MP3Slovo Media s.r.o. Their compensation comes from the platform's ad-supported tier and partner-library contributions — never from publishers whose work they recommend. We publish a short annual letter on editorial independence in January, and a public register of any commercial relationship between an editor and a rights-holder is kept on each editor's profile page.