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 700 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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Sappho
Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, probably around 620-550 BC. In antiquity, she was considered a great lyric poet, referred to by Plato as ‘the tenth Muse’, her likeness appearing on coins. Her work was first published around third century BC, but much of it was lost for years, until papyri fragments of her poems first began to be discovered in 1898.
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May Sarton
May Sarton (1912 – 1995) was born in Belgium, and grew up in the US. Her writing career began in the 1930s and she published poetry, memoir and novels during her lifetime. Her memoir, Journal of a Solitude, was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Her last poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994.
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Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967) was an English poet and author who served on the Western Front, was awarded the Military Cross and became one of the leading poets of World War One, also having a significant influence on the work of poet Wilfred Owen. His Collected Poems 1908-1956 was published by Faber and Faber in 1961. He also wrote fictionalised autobiographical books, the first of which was Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, published in 1928.
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Tom Sastry
Tom Sastry is a British poet. His most recent collection is You have No Normal Country To Return To (Nine Arches Press, 2022) which explores national identity and ‘the end of history’. His first collection A Man’s House Catches Fire (Nine Arches Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize.
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Carole Satyamurti
Carole Satyamurti (1939 – 2019) was a British poet and translator. She came to writing poetry in later life, having been a sociology lecturer for many years. Her first collection was Broken Moon (Oxford University Press, 1987) which was followed by five further collections. Her retelling of the Indian epic poem the Mahabharata was published in 2015.
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Lesley Saunders
Lesley Saunders is a poet, poetry mentor and translator. She studied Classics at university and went on to publish numerous collections including most recently This Thing of Blood & Love (Two Rivers Press, 2022). She has also translated the work of the Portuguese poet Maria Teresa Horta.
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