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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Declan Ryan
Declan Ryan is an Irish poet and critic in living in London. His first collection Crisis Actor is forthcoming in the UK from Faber & Faber (July 2023) and is to be published in the US in 2024. His essays have been widely published in journals including The Guardian, The New York Review of Books and the TLS.
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Kay Ryan
Kay Ryan was born in California in 1945 and is the author of several books of poetry, including Say Uncle (2000), The Niagara River (2005) and The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2011), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her other awards include a Maurice English Poetry Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006 and appointed United States Poet Laureate from 2008-2010.
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Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-West (1892 – 1962) was an English novelist and poet, as well as being a renowned gardener who helped design and create the famous gardens at Sissinghurst in Kent. Her poetry often celebrates the English landscape and her long poem ‘The Land’ is the best-known example of this. She was also the model for the character Orlando in Virginia Woolf’s novel of that title.
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Sarah Salway
Sarah Salway is a poet, novelist and journalist based in Kent. She’s a former Canterbury Laureate and currently helps to run reading groups around the country for the Royal Literary Fund. Her work has been published widely including in the Financial Times, Poetry London, the Rialto and commissioned for BBC Radio 4. Her last collection, Learning Springsteen on my Language App, was a joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize and published by Indigo Dreams.
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Jacob Sam-La Rose
Jacob Sam-La Rose was born in London. His poetry collection Breaking Silence (Bloodaxe, 2011) was shortlisted for several awards including the Forward Prize and his poems have been widely anthologised and published in journals. Jacob is actively involved in facilitating a range of creative writing and spoken word programmes in schools and arts centres across the UK.
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Ana Sampson
Ana Sampson grew up in Kent and studied English Literature at the University of Sheffield. After a career in publishing PR, she went on to edit her first anthology I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (Michael O’Mara Books, 2009) which was the third best-selling poetry title of that year. Since then she has edited a number of highly-acclaimed anthologies, including most recently She is Fierce (Pan MacMillan, 2018). Ana has appeared on television and radio discussing books and reading, and is a passionate advocate of the anthology form.
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