Storytelling has always existed through spoken word, from people sharing memories around a fire to performers taking the stage. Storytelling podcasts bring that tradition to your headphones, preserving live performances, personal experiences, and imagined worlds in a format you can listen to anywhere.
1. The Moth
In the 1990s the poet and novelist George Dawes Green moved to New York. He missed the summer evenings of his native Georgia, where he and his friends traded tales on a porch on St. Simons Island. Moths gathered around the porch light, so the group was inspired to call themselves The Moths. In 1997, Green restaged those evenings in his New York living room. Word spread, and the events soon moved to cafes and clubs across the city. The Moth’s format is built around true stories told live and without notes.
The Moth has presented over 70,000 stories across 11 countries, in grand theaters, prisons, hospitals, and at least one graveyard, and the podcast collects recordings from those stages. Tellers perform from memory, so the audience gets raw storytelling. The National Endowment for the Arts has credited The Moth with spawning oral storytelling showcases across the United States, and its open-mic StorySLAM nights let anyone enter to tell a five-minute story on the night’s theme. Fun fact: The Moth Radio Hour won a Peabody Award in 2010 and airs on over 450 public radio stations.
2. Snap Judgment
In 2007, public radio ran a talent contest asking one strange question: “Do you have hostiness?” Over 1,400 people entered the Public Radio Talent Quest, run by PRX and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Among them was Glynn Washington, a University of Michigan law graduate who had worked as a tax attorney, an educator and a diplomat. He won, secured seed funding, and in July 2010 the NPR podcast Snap Judgment went on air with co-founder Mark Ristich. PRX has distributed it since 2020. Each episode gathers true stories on a theme, with Washington narrating between them, and PRX describes the result as cinematic nonfiction scored with original music.
Time Magazine put Snap Judgment on its list of the Top 100 Podcasts of All Time, and Washington has been inducted into the Podcast Hall of Fame. The 2017 spin-off Spooked applies the same production to true supernatural accounts, so start there if you want the scary half of the catalog. Fun fact: Washington’s official biography lists his previous jobs as educator, diplomat, community activist, actor, political strategist, fist-shaker, mountain-hollerer, and foot stomper.
3. This American Life
In 1995 the MacArthur Foundation gave Chicago’s WBEZ a grant for a new show about local culture, and Ira Glass, who had started as an NPR intern at nineteen, negotiated to make it weekly. It debuted on November 17, 1995 as ‘Your Radio Playhouse’ and took its current name the following March. The founding ethos, in Glass’s words, was “nobody who’s famous, nothing you’ve ever heard of, nothing in the news.” Each hour picks a theme and moves through it in acts, mixing reporting with personal essays, and contributors have included David Sedaris, whose reading of ‘Santaland Diaries’ launched his career, and Sarah Koenig, who went on to make Serial.
For me, it remains the benchmark for good narrative podcasts. Glass’s approach to narrative radio has influenced the wider podcasting world, and he has also worked as an editor on Serial, S-Town and Nice White Parents. Three decades of long form storytelling have won the show seven Peabody Awards and, in 2020, the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded for audio journalism, given for ‘The Out Crowd’, an episode about asylum seekers sent back to Mexico to wait for their U.S. asylum hearings under the Trump administration’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy. Fun fact: The 2008 episode ‘The Giant Pool of Money’, which explained the housing crisis, became the first podcast episode inducted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.
4. Heavyweight
In each episode of Heavyweight, a guest names a moment from their past that they regret or never understood, and Jonathan Goldstein makes the phone calls needed to settle it. The show launched at Gimlet Media in September 2016. An early example is episode two, ‘Gregor’; Goldstein’s friend Gregor had lent a stack of CDs to the musician Moby, the music on them fed into the album ‘Play’, which sold in the millions, and two decades later Gregor wanted them back. Spotify cancelled the show in December 2023 after acquiring Gimlet, and Pushkin Industries revived it, with new episodes resuming in 2025.
Episodes typically run around 40 to 60 minutes, with Goldstein gradually expanding the show from stories involving people he knew to stories submitted by listeners. Fun fact: Goldstein told The New Yorker the name refers to the emotional burdens each of us carries.
5. MrBallen Podcast
John Allen was serving as a US Navy SEAL when a grenade bounced off his shoulder in Afghanistan and detonated near his feet, sending shrapnel into his hips and legs. He medically retired in 2017, co-founded an organization helping special-forces veterans find jobs, and in early 2020 posted a TikTok about the Dyatlov Pass incident, the unsolved deaths of nine Russian hikers in 1959. It went viral, and his digital storytelling audience grew to millions across TikTok and YouTube. He launched his podcast in February 2022, styled ‘Strange, Dark and Mysterious Stories’, and within months Amazon signed him to a multiyear deal.
The MrBallen storytelling format did not change in the move from video to audio; he tells each story solo, and graphic episodes open with a warning. Allen told The Boston Globe that many fans describe the stories as relaxing, even though the content can be gruesome. Ballen Studios, the company he co-founded, also produces MrBallen’s Medical Mysteries, and his MrBallen Foundation gives quarterly grants of up to $25,000 to organizations supporting victims of violent crime. Fun fact: His father worked as a reporter and editor at The Boston Globe, and The Hollywood Reporter counts two Pulitzer Prize winners among his relatives.
6. Lore
Aaron Mahnke was a freelance graphic designer writing supernatural thrillers on the side, and in 2015 he prepared a giveaway to promote them, as a document called ‘My Five Favorite New England Myths’. He wrote four of the myths, saw the word count had passed 15,000, and decided nobody would read a PDF that long on a phone. Since he listened to audiobooks himself, he recorded one myth aloud instead and sent it to a friend, who told him to release the recordings as a podcast. He gave in, and published the first episode of Lore in March 2015. By August, production companies were emailing him about adapting the podcast for television.
Lore is a horror storytelling podcast drawn from documented history, covering haunted places, creepy people and unsolved murders. The delivery has been compared to campfire storytelling, with Mahnke narrating alone throughout. Episodes run 17 to 44 minutes, and Apple named the show Best of iTunes in both 2015 and 2016. Fun fact: The television adaptation, made with producers of The Walking Dead and The X-Files, premiered on Amazon Prime on Friday the 13th of October 2017.
7. The Truth
Jonathan Mitchell calls his show ‘movies for your ears’. Each episode of The Truth is a short film without pictures, performed by actors, recorded on location, and finished with layered sound design. The pilot, ‘Moon Graffiti’, imagined Apollo 11 crashing on the lunar surface and won a Gold Mark Time Award in 2010. In December 2011 Mitchell and the actor Ed Herbstman hired a group of improvisers, many from New York’s Magnet Theater, to develop stories collectively, and the show became a founding member of the Radiotopia network, releasing over 120 audio stories across the following decade.
Each episode brings a new cast and a new plot, so there is no backstory to learn, and the genres run from comedy to horror to political thriller. It’s truly an impressive fiction anthology. The show’s feed suggests ‘Silvia’s Blood’ and ‘That’s Democracy’ as starting points, and the team at Apple Podcasts included it in their 20 Years, 20 Podcasts We Love list. Fun fact: ‘Moon Graffiti’ was inspired by an actual contingency speech written in 1969, prepared in case the Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the moon.
8. LeVar Burton Reads
For 23 years LeVar Burton hosted Reading Rainbow, the PBS series that introduced generations of children to books and reading. In June 2017 he launched LeVar Burton Reads and called it a Reading Rainbow for adults. Each episode features one piece of short fiction, chosen by Burton, read in full, followed by his thoughts on it. His selections ranged from Elmore Leonard’s western ‘No Man’s Guns’ to Neil Gaiman’s ‘Chivalry’, in which an elderly widow buys the Holy Grail from a charity shop.
The show released 207 episodes between 2017 and 2024, and a new listener can start with any author they already like. I would count Burton among the best storytellers of all time in American broadcasting. Fun fact: The Buffalo broadcaster WNED sued Burton in 2017 for using his old catchphrase, “But you don’t have to take my word for it”, on the podcast; the suit settled within months, and he got to use the line again.
9. Poetry Unbound
Pádraig Ó Tuama grew up Catholic near Cork, who has said poetry became his language of survival. He went on to lead the Corrymeela Community, a peace and reconciliation organization in Northern Ireland, and spent years as a conflict mediator before On Being Studios launched Poetry Unbound with him in 2020. In each fifteen-minute episode he reads one poem aloud, then shares his reflections. Season one featured Joy Harjo, Tracy K. Smith, Ocean Vuong, Emily Dickinson and the spoken word artist Raymond Antrobus.
Ó Tuama’s commentary is observational, and he prompts listeners to find their own parallels in each poem. The archive covers spoken word poetry alongside page poets. If you are hunting for the best spoken word poems, the Raymond Antrobus episode is a good place to start. Fun fact: In the early pandemic, when officials advised singing Happy Birthday twice while washing your hands, Ó Tuama recited Yeats’s ‘To a Child Dancing in the Wind’ instead, reporting that it lasted the right amount of time.
Whether you want something funny, unsettling, emotional, educational, or thought-provoking, storytelling podcasts can match almost any mood. The variety of shows available means there is always another narrative waiting to be discovered. The Moth and Snap Judgment put true stories at the center, while The Truth and LeVar Burton Reads take very different approaches to fiction.