Read more about how some of our authors (and others) got started as ELT writers, plus some further anecdotes and tips here.
Janet Aitchison
Janet started her career in ELT as a teacher at St Giles International in Brighton. After realizing that she could combine her dual interests in teaching and publishing she got a job at Longman ELT as an Editor. Throughout her career she has worked for Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press in addition to Longman. She has been involved in a wide range of ELT products in both British and American English, from primary to secondary to adult, and she has published for many markets, from Brazil to Europe to the United States. She has held a number of positions over the years, including development editor, editorial manager, publisher, publishing manager and publishing director.
Janet is the author of How ELT Publishing Works.
Kathryn Aldridge-Morris
Kathryn is an ELT author, specialising in resources for migrants and refugees, and a prize-winning writer of short fiction. She taught ESOL in community and FE settings for over a decade before becoming a full-time writer and ESOL consultant. She has been a project coordinator for the British Council’s ESOL Nexus website and has written and contributed to over 20 ELT titles, as well as articles and online resources.
Kathryn is the author of How To Write ESOL Materials.
John Allison
John has designed, sold and delivered professional English courses in France since 1980. After many years of squeezing in teaching between sales and management responsibilities, he is now happy to spend more time in the classroom as a teacher and teacher trainer. He takes a special interest in new technologies and blended learning. Writing for Macmillan, he is co-author of In Company Case Studies, The Business (Intermediate, Upper Intermediate and Advanced), In Company 3.0 (Upper Intermediate) and In Company 3.0 ESP series Supply Chain Management and Logistics.
John is the author of How To Write Business English Materials.
Katherine Bilsborough
Katherine has worked in ELT since 1986 as a teacher, trainer and author. She has published coursebooks and materials for all ages and contexts. Her primary materials include Ace!, Oxford Rooftops, Big Questions, Bright Ideas and Look! She develops print and digital materials for the British Council and the BBC and regularly contributes to the LearnEnglish and TeachingEnglish websites and NGL’s In Focus blog. Katherine is co-founder of the ELT Footprint community.
Katherine is the author of How To Write Primary Materials.
Graham Burton
Graham has been involved in ELT since 2000, in a number of different roles, including teacher, teacher trainer, lecturer, materials writer and editor. He currently lives in northern Italy, and teaches at the faculty of Education at the University of Bozen-Bolzano. He has an MA and PhD in Applied Linguistics; the latter explored how the ‘tradition’ of pedagogical grammar for ELT evolved, and how it compares to empirical evidence on the use that learners make of grammar as they progress through competency levels.
Graham is the co-author of How To Write Grammar Presentations And Practice.
Lindsay Clandfield
Beginning his career on Onestopenglish and iT’s for Teachers magazine, Lindsay’s first big published work were the popular photocopiables for New English File (OUP). He was also the author of courses such as Global, Straightforward (Macmillan) and Studio (Helbling). Lindsay’s writing for teachers includes Dealing with Difficulties (co-written with Luke Prodromou) and Teaching Online (co-written with Nicky Hockly). Both are published by Delta Publishing, and Lindsay is the series editor of the Delta Development Books for Teachers Series.
Lindsay is the author of How To Plan A Book.
Sarah Cunningham
Sarah taught in Spain and the UK before doing the DELTA in 1986. Liz Soars was her course tutor and suggested her (and course-mate Bill Bowler) as authors for Headway Pronunciation. Sarah went on to write other Headway supplementaries before writing (with husband, Peter Moor) the first edition of Cutting Edge in 1998. They wrote two further editions of this ground-breaking adult course as well as an upper secondary course called Real Life.
Sarah is the author of How To Write Speaking Activities.
Kieran Donaghy
Kieran is a teacher, trainer and award-winning writer based in Barcelona. He teaches at UAB Idiomes Barcelona, part of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He has taught in the UK, Italy, Portugal and Spain. He is an experienced writer. He is the co-author of Films in Health Sciences Education and has a very successful blog on the use of film, which has won numerous awards including Best Individual Blog in the 2011 Edublog Awards and the British Council ELTons award for Innovation in Teaching Resources in 2013. He has Master’s degrees in TEFL, and Business Communication, and has a special interest in the uses of film in education.
Kieran is the co-author of How To Write Film And Video Activities.
Paul Dummett
Paul Dummett is a teacher and writer based in Oxford. His early career was spent as a DoS and course designer at Regent School in Oxford. He set up his own school in 1998 dedicated to teaching adults and professionals, but left the business in 2006 to concentrate on writing. He is the author of various general English, Business and ESP titles, including Success with BEC (NGL), Energy English (NGL), Life (NGL), Keynote (NGL) and Navigate (OUP).
Paul is the author of How To Write Critical Thinking Activities.
Evan Frendo
Evan has worked as a freelance ELT Professional, specializing in Business English and English for Specific Purposes, since 1993. He is currently based in Berlin, Germany, but his work takes him to different parts of Europe and Asia. Primarily he is a business English trainer, but also provides consultancy services to a number of corporations, trains business English teachers and writes training materials. He has an MA in Teaching ESP (Aston University), a Diploma in Teaching English for Business (London Chamber of Commerce and Industry), as well as a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering (Cranfield University).
Evan is the author of How To Write Corporate Training Materials.
Diane Hall
Diane spent several years teaching English, mainly in the UK, before moving into ELT publishing. She worked mainly on adult and secondary materials, first as an editor and then as a publisher, for Thomas Nelson and Sons (later bought by Longman ELT). She went freelance in the early 90s, combining editorial work and writing ELT materials with some teaching. Over the years she has co-written a number of ELT publications, most notably Pacesetter (Oxford University Press), Total English/New Total English Elementary (Pearson) and MyGrammarLab (Pearson). Since 2008 Diane has also been working as a tutor in Linguistics/English Language for the Open University.
Diane is the co-author of How To Write Grammar Presentations And Practice.
John Hughes
John Hughes is an award-winning ELT coursebook author and teacher trainer. With over 50 titles, his main course series are Life, World English (National Geographic Learning) and Business Result (Oxford University Press). He’s also written methodology titles and is the series editor of the ETpedia teacher resource series (Pavilion ELT). He trains teachers from all over the world and leads courses in materials writing and critical thinking at Oxford University. His website is www.johnhugheselt.com.
John is the author of How To Write Audio And Video Scripts.
Sue Kay
Sue started out as an ELT teacher in France in 1980. When she moved back to the UK she worked at the Lake School of English in Oxford where she was responsible for materials writing. Some communicative activities that she’d written for teachers to use at school became the Reward Resource Packs and were published by Heinemann. The copyright has now reverted to Sue, so she and ELT Teacher 2 Writer are updating and republishing them.
Sue now writes with writing partner Vaughan Jones and they’ve written coursebooks Inside Out and New Inside Out for Macmillan, two editions of upper secondary course Focus for Pearson, the video lessons for Language Hub for Macmillan, and writing and speaking pages of Repetytorium for Pearson.
Sue is one of the co-founders, along with Karen Spiller and Karen White, of ELT Teacher 2 Writer and co-founder of ELT Publishing Professionals, a dynamic online directory that brings together publishers and freelancers.
Sue is the author of How To Adapt Authentic Texts.
Philip Kerr
Philip Kerr is a teacher trainer and materials writer who lives in Vienna. As a lead author or co-author, he has written coursebooks in a number of series, including Inside Out and Straightforward (Macmillan), Evolve (Cambridge University Press) and Studio (Helbling). He is also the author of Translation and Own-Language Activities (Cambridge University Press). He blogs about technology and language teaching at Adaptive Learning In ELT.
Philip is the author of How To Write Vocabulary Presentations And Practice.
Caroline Krantz
Caroline lives in Oxford where she works as a freelance ELT author. She taught in Spain and the UK, before making the move from teacher to writer in 2005. She’s written Student’s Books (Move On and two levels of Navigate OUP), Workbooks (Target FCE, Richmond), Teacher’s books (Solutions, OUP) and Teacher’s Resource Books (Headway Elementary, Pre-Intermediate and Intermediate). She also writes listening tests for Cambridge ESOL.
Caroline is the author of How To Write Reading And Listening Activities.
Lewis Lansford
Lewis got his first taste of teaching English in Barcelona in the late 1980s. The experience inspired him to get a Master’s in TESOL, after which he taught at a university language centre in Arizona and then a manufacturing company in Japan. In 1995, he took an editorial job with a major publisher in Hong Kong developing materials for Asia, and in 1997 became a freelance editor, project manager and writer in the UK. He has worked on books, videos, tests, audio materials, worksheets, apps and online materials for English learners of all ages across the world. He currently lives in York.
Lewis is the author of How To Write And Deliver Talks.
Sue Leather
Sue Leather has been in the ELT field for thirty years. Originally from the north west of England, between 1985 and 2000, she worked as a teacher, teacher trainer and educational manager in Spain, UK and the Netherlands. She has an MA in Education from the Institute of Education, University of London. She has written a number of articles for ELT journals and magazines, and is a frequent presenter at international conferences. In 2000, she set up her own consultancy group, Sue Leather Associates, and works on educational projects all over the world. Her main interests within ELT are materials development, teacher training and trainer training.
Sue has been writing original learner fiction since 1990, and has written some thirty readers. Her Dead Cold, published by Cambridge University Press, won the Extensive Reading Foundation award in 2005. Sue is currently Co-Series Editor for Page Turners, a series of original fiction for National Geographic Learning. She now lives on the beautiful west coast of Canada, where she gains inspiration for her work.
Sue is the author of How To Write Graded Readers.
Fiona Mauchline
After 28 years in Spain, and 30 years’ teaching, Fiona now lives in Oxford, working as a freelance ELT writer/author, teacher trainer, speaker and occasional editor. Her writing is mainly for secondary, adults, or Graded Readers, but she also writes teacher training and teacher development materials and short courses, again particularly focussing on secondary education and exam preparation. Fiona has co-authored and authored various ELT courses, including Motivate, a four-level secondary course published by Macmillan, as well as a slew of Teacher’s Books and other resource materials, and regularly works with various publishers.
Fiona is the author of How To Write Secondary Materials.
Amanda McLoughlin
Amanda first moved from the world of ELT teaching to CLIL teaching in 2008, when she was offered a job in a soft CLIL programme (a programme in which content is taught as a part of a wider ELT programme) in a primary school in the north of Spain. She became the science and arts and crafts teacher, and had to create all her own materials for this.
Amanda has also worked extensively for OUP, writing upper-primary social and natural science coursebooks (first and second editions), activity books and teacher’s books, tests, extension worksheets, revision worksheets. She has also been involved in secondary level materials, and has learned a lot about biology, geology and Spanish history along the way!
She now works almost exclusively as a CLIL materials writer and as a freelance CLIL teacher trainer, working with teachers in several different autonomous communities around Spain.
Amanda is the author of How To Write CLIL Materials.
Julie Moore
After an early career as an EFL teacher, working in Greece and the Czech Republic, Julie moved into ELT publishing initially as a lexicographer. She worked on learner’s dictionaries for all the major UK dictionary publishers before branching out into writing other ELT materials. She’s written materials for General English courses such as Global and Navigate, and she has a special interest in vocabulary, working on numerous vocabulary resources including ETpedia Vocabulary and Key Word for IELTS. She became interested in EAP while teaching on pre-sessional courses at Bristol University and has worked on EAP materials projects including Oxford EAP (C1), Oxford Academic Vocabulary Practice and the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English.
She’s now based in Bristol in the UK. She regularly blogs and tweets about EAP, vocabulary and corpus research. Her website is: www.juleswords.co.uk and she tweets as @lexicojules
Julie is the author of How To Write EAP Materials.
Diane Nicholls
After a short period teaching English as a Foreign Language, then working as a technical and specialised translator, Diane worked as a freelance Lexicographer, ELT publishing project manager, materials developer, author and editor for 27 years. Alongside her ELT publishing projects, Diane was responsible for developing and managing the Cambridge Learner Corpus error annotation project and became increasingly involved in corpus analysis and research into the needs of learners of English, and the development of evidence-based learning and teaching materials, digital tools and resources. More recently, she has been working on the application of Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning to the development of online tools for learners and teachers.
Diane is the author of A Lexicon For ELT Professionals.
Roy Norris
In a career spanning 35 years, Roy started out teaching French and German in England before moving to Madrid in 1989 to work in ELT, mainly for International House. He also spent a brief period in the 1990s as Director of Studies at Soros International House in Vilnius, Lithuania. Roy has been writing for Macmillan for over 20 years, and is the author of Straight to First, Ready for First and Straightforward Advanced, and co-author of Ready for Advanced.
Roy is the author of How To Write Exam Preparation Materials.
Laura Patsko
Laura is an experienced teacher, trainer and researcher who now works mainly as a language and learning consultant. She specializes in teacher education, pronunciation and ELF, and is author or co-author of several books, chapters and articles on these topics. She is also former Editor of Speak Out!, the journal of the IATEFL Pronunciation Special Interest Group (2014–17). She tweets as @lauraahaha and @BlackbirdLXD.
Laura is the co-author of How To Write Pronunciation Activities.
Karen Richardson
Originally from the UK, Karen started teaching English in Germany in the mid-90s and had her first ELT materials published in 2002 (by German educational publisher, Langenscheidt). Since then she’s written a multitude of online worksheets for Macmillan’s Onestopenglish (The Guardian weekly news lessons, Business Spotlight lessons, Celebrations lesson plans, etc), National Geographic Learning and Pearson ELT, as well as coursebook components and Teacher’s Books for Macmillan ELT (The Business, In Company, and English for Law Enforcement), National Geographic Learning (Keynote) and Cornelsen Verlag (Basis for Business). She’s also been a regular contributor to Business Spotlight magazine for many years.
Her website is www.compass-elt.com
Karen is the author of How To Write Worksheets.
Rachael Roberts
Rachael has been an ELT teacher and teacher trainer for over 20 years, and writing ELT materials since 1998. Among other titles, she is the author of IELTS Foundation, Premium B1, the new edition of Total English Intermediate (Pearson) and Navigate B1+ and B2 (OUP). Rachael is also a Life Coach for teachers and other educational professionals.
Rachael is the author of How To Write Writing Activities.
Mike Sayer
Mike Sayer is a teacher, teacher trainer and author based in Oxfordshire in the UK. He began his teaching career in Thessloniki in Greece in 1986, and worked in EFL schools in Milan and Oxford before becoming a CELTA teacher trainier at the Regent School in Oxford before going freelance in 2002. Since then he has run CELTA courses all over the world, in places as far-flung as Thailand and South Africa, Georgia, Italy, Slovenia, Dubai, Venezuela and the United States. He has also run teacher training workshops for in-service teachers in Spain, Ukraine and the UK.
Mike’s writing career began in 2001 when he started writing the teacher’s books for OUP’s New Headway course in the UK and the US. Writing teacher’s books for this long-lasting, world-famous course was a very good grounding. Since then he has written numerous teacher’s books, workbooks and resource books for OUP, Macmillan and National Geographic Learning. Notable teacher’s books include Landmark Advanced (OUP), Straightforward Beginner, Elementary and Advanced (Macmillan), Attitude 4 and 5 (Macmillan), Matura Explorer (National Geographic Learning) and both the Life series and the Outcomes series (National Geographic Learning). Mike has also written a successful student’s book series for the Spanish bachillerato market, which is called Time for English (Macmillan).
Mike is the co-author of How To Write Teacher’s Books.
Tyson Seburn
Tyson is an instructor and Assistant Academic Director of International Programs at New College, University of Toronto. He holds an MA Educational Technology & TESOL from the University of Manchester. His interest focuses on teacher development and exploring the application of inclusive and critical pedagogy to language teaching contexts. He discusses these interests on 4CinELT (fourc.ca), on social media (@seburnt), and through his role as Coordinator of the IATEFL Teacher Development Special Interest Group committee (tdsig.org). He is also the author of Academic Reading Circles (The Round, 2015).
Tyson is the author of How To Write Inclusive Materials.
Katy Simpson
Katy is a teacher and materials writer currently based in Japan. She has worked in the UK, Thailand, and Dubai, where she developed an interest in the use of English as a Lingua Franca. She co-authors a blog about English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) pronunciation, at elfpron.wordpress.com, which aims to bridge the gap between research and the classroom. Katy has spoken about ELF pronunciation at conferences around the world, including a presentation for the British Council Seminar Series. In 2016, she set up an online school aimed at students who use English internationally, at myenglishvoice.com, which publishes weekly self-study materials aimed at developing students’ listening and pronunciation skills. My English Voice is a finalist in the 2017 ELTons for Innovation in Learner Resources.
Katy is the co-author of How To Write Pronunciation Activities.
Anna Whitcher
Anna studied at the University of California at Berkeley and has a Masters in English from San Francisco State University. She has taught English and Spanish to teenagers and adults in US and European schools. She has worked in applied linguistics research and now writes and edits ELT materials. Her published work includes both print and digital/online materials for Brookemead ELT, Cambridge University Press (USA), Pearson Longman, Marlins ELT, and the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington DC.
Anna is the co-author of How To Write Film And Video Activities.
Ros Wright
Ros has worked as a teacher, Director of Studies and Assistant ESP editor. Twice President of TESOL France, she is currently member of both the IATEFL Proposals Committee and the Conference Committee. Ros holds an MA in ELT Materials Development and has co-written several English for Medical Purposes (EMP) titles including English for Medicine (Garnet) and Vocational English for Nurses 1&2 (Pearson) as well as a management title for the Vocabulary in Use series (CUP). Her first publication, Good Practice: Communication Skills in English for the Medical Practitioner (CUP), co-written with Marie McCullagh, was shortlisted for the 2008 British Council Award for Innovation and won the inaugural BESIG-David Riley Award for Innovation in ESP.
Ros is the author of How To Write ESP Materials and the co-author of How To Write Teacher’s Books.