Do you know when your favorite author died? Our guest probably does! In our tenth episode, we bring you part one of our two part interview with Nick Bullard, who has been in the graded reader business for a long time both as editor and as writer. As an editor, he has extensive experience managing the graded readers for Oxford University Press. As a writer, he has adapter some classic stories such as, Arnold Bennet’s The Card, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, H.G.Wells’ The Invisible Man, and Ian Fleming’s Octopussy and The Living Daylights.
In this part of the interview, Nick explains his background in graded readers, how Oxford University Press’s Bookworms and Dominos series began, and the challenges of adapting classic works.
For those of you who may want to have a deeper look at graded readers, here are some links: Assessing graded readers by Peter Viney, How the publishers make the grade, by Gillian Claridge, and one of David Hill’s graded readers reviews for the ELT Journal are texts that deal with graded readers in general. Anne Collins’s Macmillan guide and Marcos Benevides’s Making the grade are texts about different ways of writing graded readers. Finally, this post by Richard MacAndrew tells a story of perseverance and hope for authors.
Next week, we’ll be taking a week off to let Jose move into a new house. The following week we will share the second part of our interview with Nick.
As always, happy reading!
The Extensive Reading Podcast 