CATH BRUZZONE:
Hi, I’m Cath and I’m a publisher and the owner of b small publishing, which I started in 1990. After teaching French and Italian at secondary schools, I spent 10 years at Pan Books, developing language learning and children’s activity books, including the Breakthrough series of home study language courses (now published by Macmillan) and the Learn Together series of home study workbooks for parents and children. Though I spend a lot of my time helping other people to learn languages, I love to learn new languages myself. My two children, Lucy and Annie, are bilingual in English and Italian and I’ve dabbled with Turkish and Arabic, passed a GCSE in Spanish, got to grips with Mandarin Chinese to visit Lucy when she was teaching in China in 2001 and I’m currently learning Welsh. It’s all great fun but sometimes it’s hard to find the time to practice! Luckily, in 2002, Annie spent some time teaching in Chile, which made me brush up my Spanish again. At b small, I’m responsible for all of the books that we produce but I don’t write them all myself! Given my interest in languages, most of the books I have worked on are to help young people learn more languages. These include, the Lucy Cat Series, the Bilingual First Books, First Language with Supercat, Hide & Speak and More Hide & Speak, Language Fun and the Colour in Language books.
LONE MORTON:
I trained as a graphic designer at St Martin’s School of Art and initially started my career in promotion and advertising. As a freelance, I began to work with books and helped for ten years to develop the style and design of the b small list and contributed to the creation of many of the titles, particularly in collaboration with Clare Beaton. My interest in writing for children and my passion for design and crafts led to my writing three stories for the I Can Read series and three titles in the Stencil Book series. I’m also joint author of the Language Fun series, Pen Pals and All About Me in the First Record Series. After two holidays working on an organic farm in Canada, I became a very keen organic gardener and have since converted my back garden in West London into a flourishing organic plot. As a result, my book Grow Organic, Eat Organic shares my practical advice and I’m sure it will appeal to other budding organic gardeners of all ages. I have two children and now run a furniture business, Isokon, with my husband. Unfortunately, this means I have less time for creating children’s books!
