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.

  • Penny Sharman

    Penny Sharman is a published poet, photographer, artist and therapist. She is inspired by wild landscapes and relationships between the seen and unseen. Penny has an MA in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University. She has had poems published in magazines such as The Interpreter’s House, Strix, The North, Finished Creatures, Orbis, Ink Sweat &Tears & Mslexia. Her books Fair Ground, Swim With Me In Deep Water, The Day before Joy, Catching the Heather & The Ash of Time, Sunbathing with Fishermen are available to buy from her website. Penny is Editor of Obsessed with Pipework Poetry Magazine.

    pennysharman.co.uk

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  • Clare Shaw

    Clare Shaw was born in Burnley. She has published three collections with Bloodaxe: Straight Ahead (2006), Head On (2012), and Flood (2018). Her fourth collection Towards a General Theory of Love was awarded a Northern Writer’s Award and will be published by Bloodaxe in 2022.  Clare is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, a co-Director of the Kendal Poetry Festival; and a regular tutor for the Arvon Foundation.

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  • Judith Shaw

    Judith Shaw has lived in various places in the UK but has been settled in St Leonards on Sea since 2004 when she returned from Iceland, where she lived and worked for a year. She has poems published by The Frogmore Papers, The Fib Review and Obsessed with Pipework, and was the Featured Poet in an edition of Orbis. She is a psychotherapist and dyslexia specialist and is also a painter and printmaker.

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  • James Sheard

    James Sheard was born in Cyprus and spent his childhood abroad, mainly in Singapore and Germany. He is the author of three collections of poetry, all published by Jonathan Cape: Scattering Eva (2005), shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, Dammtor (2010) and The Abandoned Settlements (2017) which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. He is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Keele University.

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  • Percy Bysshe Shelley

    Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822) was born in Sussex  and married Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Frankenstein, in 1814. His friends included Keats and Lord Byron. Prolific in his lifetime, his poems include the long visionary pieces Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Queen Mab (1830). Expelled from school for his atheistic views, he led an unconventional life, participating in political reform activities. He drowned in a sailing accident in 1822, aged 29.

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  • Nan Shepherd

    Nan Shepherd (1893 – 1981) was a Scottish writer whose most famous book is The Living Mountain, written in the 1940s but not published until 1977. It describes in poetic prose her hillwalking experiences in the Cairngorms, always undertaken alone. She published only one collection of poetry In the Cairngorms (1934) which explores her deep kinship with the natural world.

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