Rachel Bladon is a British English-as-a-Foreign-Language teacher, editor, and graded-reader author with more than twenty years of teaching, editing, and writing experience across Europe and Asia. She is the author of more than thirty-four graded readers across Oxford University Press, Macmillan Education, and Usborne, written for English-language learners from beginner through upper-intermediate level and from young children through adult, in both fiction retellings and original non-fiction.
She has been series editor of the Oxford Bookworms Library since 2014, when she took over from longtime editor Jennifer Bassett. The Oxford Bookworms Library is one of the two largest graded reader series in the world, with hundreds of titles spanning seven levels from Starter (250 headwords) through Stage 6 (2,500 headwords) and used in classroom and self-study programs around the world. As series editor she oversees acquisition, level grading, language control, and quality assurance across the line. She has written five of the series' own titles including an adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, an adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, and the Factfile Japan.
For Macmillan Education she has written multiple titles in the Macmillan Cultural Readers and Macmillan Readers series, including the popular England, Gandhi, and other cultural and biographical readers across the Pre-Intermediate and Intermediate levels. Her other graded-reader work includes contributions to the Oxford Read and Discover non-fiction series (Trees, Young Animals, Farms, Animal Life Cycles), Anne Frank for the Oxford Bookworms Library, an adaptation of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, and the Classic Tales adaptation of Don Quixote. Her Usborne titles include English Grammar and Improve Your Grammar in the Better English series.
She has won the Language Learner Literature Award for one of her stories, and two additional titles have been finalists for the same award. Her work is used in EFL and ESL classrooms in primary, secondary, and adult education programs worldwide.
