Slow on purpose
Six collections are planned across several years, not several months. A series a teacher can rely on for a decade is worth more than a shelf filled quickly.
About
A small imprint with one job.
Redbruk publishes graded readers and teacher materials for people learning English. Everything else is in service of that.
The mission
Turning knowledge into understanding.
There is a great deal of material in the world and not much of it is built for the person actually holding it. A learner at A1 does not need a shorter book. They need a book measured to them — where the vocabulary has been counted, the sentences have been shaped, and the story still ends somewhere worth arriving.
That measurement is most of the work at Redbruk, and it is the part nobody sees. Every title is audited before publication: unique words counted, total words counted, both checked against the CEFR band on the cover. Titles that come in over the ceiling are edited down until they fit. Four of the six ORIGINS books were.
The name
Red for red hair and for Internacional, in Porto Alegre. br for Brazil, where the founder is from. uk for the country he writes from now. It is a small name carrying three places, which is roughly what the books are about.
How this imprint works
Built once, used many times
Every story becomes a reader, a worksheet, a teacher resource, and eventually an audio edition — from one carefully made source.
The teacher comes first
Learners read the books, but teachers carry them into classrooms. Materials are designed for the person standing at the front of the room.
The founder
Paulo Siciliani
Writer, content producer and language enthusiast, originally from Porto Alegre and now based in England. He studies Natural Sciences with the Open University, plays drums and guitar at his local church, and has spent most of his working life somewhere in the space between languages.
Redbruk is run single-handedly — the writing, the vocabulary audits, the covers, the worksheets and the typesetting. That is a constraint and it shows up in the pace, but it also means every book in the catalog was checked by the person whose name is on it.