Candlestick Press
Biographies
Here you can find out more about the huge range of poets we feature in our pamphlets and the artists whose work appears on our beautiful covers.
We’ve now published poems by almost 800 historical and contemporary poets. In our pages you’ll find old favourites alongside twenty-first century voices – everyone from WH Auden to Benjamin Zephaniah. Although our emphasis is on British poetry, you’ll also find Irish, American and Australian writers.
We hope these pages will encourage you to explore further the work of a poet you’ve enjoyed in one of our pamphlets.
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Jessie Pope
Jessie Pope (1868 – 1941) was an English poet, writer and journalist based in Leicester and best known for her patriotic poetry encouraging enlistment in World War One. Her work came under scrutiny from poets such as Wilfred Owen, who dedicated his poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (1917) to her in direct response. She was a regular contributor to The Daily Mail, The Daily Express and Vanity Fair, and also wrote for children. Her poems are sometimes used in schools as a contrast to the work of war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.
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Katrina Porteous
Katrina Porteous was born in Aberdeen and now lives in Northumbria. She is a poet, historian and broadcaster and is perhaps best known for her innovative radio-poetry. Her work engages with ideas of nature and place. She is President of the Northumbrian Language Society and has written several poetry collections, including most recently Two Countries (Bloodaxe 2014).
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Peter Porter
Peter Porter (1929 – 2010) was Australian by birth but lived in Britain for most of his life. After his first collection of poetry was published in 1961, he published sixteen collections as well as holding Writer-in-Residence positions at several universities. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, won the Duff Cooper and the Whitbread prizes.
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Jack Powers
Jack Powers founded the Stone Soup poetry reading series in Boston in 1971, where many famous U.S. poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Robert Bly, performed their work. He was known for nurturing new talent and published many new poets under the name Stone Soup.
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Marsha Prescod
Marsha Prescod came to the UK from Trinidad as a child. Her first poetry collection was Land of Rope and Tory (Akira Press, 1985). She is also interested in science fiction and published The Afro-Saxon Chronicles in 2020. She lectures in Law at London South Bank University.
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Estelle Price
Estelle Price lives in St Albans. She is the winner of the 2021 Welsh Poetry Competition and the 2018 Book of Kells Writing Competition. She was published in 2022 by Nine Arches Press in Primers 6, a series for emerging poets. She writes from a feminist perspective on themes including her East End past, the body and the Bloomsbury Group. Her poetry has been twice long-listed in the National and placed/listed in the Bridport, Ver, Canterbury, London Magazine and other competitions.
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