About Us


Sweet Cherry Publishing is an award-winning independent children’s book publisher based in the UK. We are a small team with a big mission! Inspired by our Leicester heritage, where over 25k children live in poverty and literacy rates are amongst the lowest in the country, we believe that all children should have access to great stories and we work to break down the socio-economic barriers that often get in the way of access to books.

Bringing great stories within everyone’s reach

Company Background

Sweet Cherry Publishing was founded in 2011 by Abdul Thadha, who grew up in an area of Leicester where children rarely spoke English outside of school and there was a clear divide of wealth, particularly in the ethnic populations. Access to books was limited in these communities, and although he had been working with children’s publishers for seven years, he didn’t feel like enough was being done to reach those children.

Accessibility takes many different forms, from pricing points to language and vocabulary to the retail channels and stockists. His bookselling business, Books2Door.com, was succeeding in developing children’s books into box sets and collections, but he wanted to go one step further and independently publish books that were easier to read, with plenty of illustrations so that children could smoothly follow the stories along, and publish in box sets to give children access to a whole library in one affordable purchase.

Since starting out in 2011, what he set out to achieve on a local level was becoming popular around the world as more countries turned to English children’s books as a tool to develop their literacy rates. Sweet Cherry’s mission to make reading fun and accessible has taken Abdul and his team all over the world, placed Sweet Cherry next to some of the greatest entertainment brands and retailers, and developed so many rising stars in British publishing.

Diversity and Inclusivity

Sweet Cherry is one of the few publishing houses in British publishing that is both led by and has over half the team comprised of the global majority. Our warehouse operations offer secure, full-time employment to over 50 warehouse operatives in the ethnically diverse Highfields area of Leicester. It’s a combination of our Leicester location and our company mission that makes our company authentically inclusive.
Our Imprints