This series of Bookworms offers younger readers the chance to enjoy lively and accessible adaptations of the best classic and modern fiction. Each title is highly illustrated to engage the reader in the world of the book and help with specific vocabulary. Accompanying exercises make all these titles suitable for use in class or at home.
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Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, the illegitimate daughter of a poverty-stricken woman, Kate, whom she believed to be her older sister. She began work in service but eventually moved south to Hastings, where she met and married Tom Cookson, a local grammar-school master.
Although she was originally acclaimed as a regional writer - her novel The Round Tower won the Winifred Holtby Award for the best regional novel of 1968 - her readership quickly spread throughout the world, and her many best-selling novels established her as one of the most popular of contemporary women novelists.
After receiving an OBE in 1985, Catherine Cookson was created a Dame of the British Empire in 1993. She was appointed an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford, in 1997.
For many years she lived near Newcastle upon Tyne. She died shortly before her ninety-second birthday, in June 1998.
