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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Ife Olatona
Ife Olatona is a multi-disciplinary writer who was born in Lagos and has lived in Nigeria and the US. His work has been widely published in magazines such as The Chicago Review of Books and The Poetry Review. He was commended in the Foyle Young Poets Awards and in 2021 was featured by The Times in an article about five top poets under 25.
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Charlotte Oliver
Charlotte Oliver is a poet who lives on the Yorkshire Coast. Her work explores the extraordinary in the everyday and has been published widely. She is one of Ilkley Literature Festival’s New Northern Poets 2023 and her debut pamphlet is How To Be A Dressing Gown (Dreich).
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Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Ostriker is a poet and academic who was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in the Manhattan housing projects during the Great Depression. She is widely known as a writer of Jewish feminist poetry and was one of the first American poets to make motherhood a subject. Her first poetry collection Songs: A Book of Poems was published by Holt Rinehart and Winston in 1969 and her most recent Waiting for the Light (University of Pittsburgh Press) in 2017.
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Alice Oswald
Alice Oswald read Classics at Oxford before training as a gardener. She published her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, in 1996. It won the Forward Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 1997. Her second collection, Dart, won the TS Eliot Prize in 2002. Memorial, her poetic reworking of Homer’s The Iliad was received with unanimous critical acclaim in 2011. She lives in Devon.
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Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 in Oswestry. He enlisted in 1915, serving in France, then was admitted with shell shock to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he met fellow poet, Siegfried Sassoon. He returned to the Front and was awarded the Military Cross in 1918, before being killed a week before Armistice. He became one of the greatest poets of the First World War, most of his poetry written between 1917 and 1918 and published posthumously.
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James P Lenfestey
James P Lenfestey is an American poet and former journalist based in Minneapolis who has published several collections including A Cartload of Scrolls:100 Poems in the Manner of T’ang Dynasty Poet Han-Shan (Holy Cow! Press, 2007). He chairs the Literary Witnesses poetry programme.
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