About the Author

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.