Winner of the very first Best Audiobook: Romance award, Georgia Tennant admits that the prospect of narrating Jilly Cooper’s 720-page romp Rivals filled her with dread. “I’ve got ADHD and dyslexia so the idea of reading out loud for days on end was about the most terrifying prospect anyone had ever suggested to me,” she says.

But Cooper’s agent told her that, when Tennant’s name was suggested, Cooper got “very excited… That meant I was like, ‘I’m probably going to have to give this a go’. Even though it was everything I absolutely would normally say no to, I just couldn’t say no to it. I had to climb that mountain”.

Rivals was one of Tennant’s favourite teen reads – and her mother, actor Sandra Dickinson, loved it too (Tennant’s father Peter Davison is also an actor). “I grew up with Rivals being on my mum’s bedside table then I nicked it – so then it was all mine.”

A couple of years ago, the discovery of Cooper’s audiobooks narrated by Sherry Baines enabled Tennant to reconnect with the joy of books.

“I’ve always found reading difficult because I find myself easily distracted,” she says. “I read at school but then I started growing up and working and had children [she is a mother of five] and there was always something that made it impossible for me to sit down and read a book.

“So when I discovered audiobooks, I realised there was a way that people with ADHD could read books, and I could be doing other things at the same time without missing the story, I could go for walks and stay focused through movement and fiddling with things.”

But spending 10 days in a recording booth was not as difficult as she had expected, partly because she was soon immersed in Cooper’s world. “With ADHD, you often end up having hyperfocus so I would lose myself and realise four hours had passed. You can so easily go, ‘Oh my gosh, how long have I been in here? It’s dark outside!’”

Also, she had a little bit of a helping hand when it came to preparation. Since her husband David starred as Tony Baddingham in the recent Netflix adaptation of Rivals, she was able to watch the show in advance. “So I knew who some of the characters were and I could go, ‘Oh, that’s Danny Dyer’.” She spent a month marking up the text, highlighting each character’s lines in individual colours.

With ADHD, you often end up having hyperfocus so I would lose myself and realise four hours had passed. You can so easily go, ‘Oh my gosh, how long have I been in here? It’s dark outside!’

Narrating such a racy book was at times “very surreal and very funny”, especially when a new engineer would start their shift while Tennant was voicing a sex scene.

Once the recording was complete – the finished product clocked in at 24 hours and 45 minutes – and Cooper started to listen to it, Tennant would receive little thank you notes in a pop-up animal card every two or three weeks.

“She’d say, ‘You’ve got a lovely voice!’ The cards were beautifully written and very sweet and I’ve kept them all because why wouldn’t you?” Naturally, the author’s death came as a shock to Tennant, who had attended a party at Cooper’s home only a couple of weeks earlier.

“She threw wonderful parties and we’d all hung out and she was so sharp and with it and exactly as she had been the year before and the year before that. But even that night, she was still watching rushes and giving notes and she was still so alive until she wasn’t. There’s something glorious about the fact that she lived her life absolutely until the moment she didn’t live it any more. I think that felt very Jilly Cooper.”

Tennant has also narrated Cooper’s Polo, and Asia Mackay’s A Serial Killer’s Guide to Marriage. When it comes to listening to audiobooks, she enjoys comedies – Mackay’s Killing It was a stand out, and Back Story, the autobiography of comedian and actor David Mitchell. “There’s something about the world we’re living in now which is quite bleak so anything that can bring a bit of lightness to it, I find quite vital.”

These days, she enjoys a portfolio career of acting, producing and writing. “I like having fingers in lots of different pies, I think it’s important to never shut a door. To add audiobooks has been a really nice, unexpected addition.

“You’re not being looked at, which is freeing. You are playing all the characters, which is harder, but there is something really fun about getting to play all the characters within what is just my own voice. And getting cast as characters I would never get cast as in real life is really, really lovely. But there is a lot of prep and that’s quite stressful.”

Still, once she sits at the microphone, she knows she just needs to read aloud, and she imagines she is telling the story to a single person. “That feels quite easy and intimate and lovely. If I imagined that hundreds of people were listening to it, I might get a bit more anxious.”

So Tennant’s Speakies Award is the icing on the cake. “I’ve never been nominated for anything! It felt so lovely because I felt I had put so much of myself into it. You read these words that mean a lot to you and you don’t want to mess it up then somebody goes, ‘Oh, you did that well’ – it’s lovely. Very unexpected but really, really nice.”