Julia Starr Keddle is an EFL course books writer and a teacher trainer. She has been involved in ELT for nearly 30 years, teaching in Italy and the UK. She and her husband Martyn Hobbs, lived in Italy for more than 10 years, teaching at Florence University and also in private language schools. She has also taught children, teenagers and adults extensively in the UK and has trained teachers at NILE, Norwich. She returned to live in Britain and worked in publishing at OUP where she developed multi-level course books for secondary schools. She still lives in Oxford. Julia and Martyn write together, combining their teaching experience with their creativity and shared vision to make learning not only motivating, involving and fun, but also easy-to-use in the classroom. They have written many successful courses, including Get Real and For Real (Helbling Languages), Your Space (CUP), Activate (Balberry) and Oxford English for Careers: Commerce (OUP). They have also written levels of Star Players (Richmond) and Real Life (Pearson). Their latest course for Richmond is three levels of Thumbs Up!. Julia is especially interested in teen development, interactional language and personal and ‘soft skills’. She is a specialist in the Common European Framework on which she has written articles, including ‘The CEF and the secondary school syllabus’ for the publication Insights from the Common European Framework (OUP). She finds that planning a course is a very creative process, and enjoys interweaving grammar, communicative and lexical syllabus strands, among others, with age-appropriate topics and activities to provide a solid foundation. Writing is fun, but a successful course is built on creative planning. Julia loves looking for interesting topics and texts. This explains the enormous boxes of cuttings, piles of magazines, and notebooks that fill her home! And when she travels she also loves to eavesdrop in order to capture real English. Finally, Julia is also a trained garden designer. A beautiful garden needs a strong ground plan, should be full of interest and variety, but be easy to use and live with all year round. Not so different from a course book!