We present the calculation of scalar and pseudoscalar Higgs production in association with a top-antitop pair to the next-to-leading order (NLO) accuracy in QCD, interfaced with parton showers according to the MC@NLO formalism. We apply our results to the cases of light and very light Higgs boson production at the LHC, giving results for total rates as well as for sample differential distributions, relevant to the Higgs, to the top quarks, and to their decay products. This work constitutes the first phenomenological application of aMC@NLO, a fully automated approach to complete event generation at NLO in QCD. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.