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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Charlotte Smith
Charlotte (Turner) Smith (1749 – 1806) wrote her first book of poetry, Elegiac Sonnets (1784), in debtor’s prison. She wrote to support her children, and also published children’s books and novels, including Emmeline (1788); but saw herself first and foremost as a poet. Beachy Head and Other Poems was published in 1807. Praised by both Wordsworth and Coleridge, she is now recognised as an important Romantic writer.
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Stevie Smith
Stevie Smith (1902 – 1971) lived all her life in Palmer’s Green, North London, and wrote fiction and poetry. Her several collections of poetry were often accompanied by her own quirky line drawings and throughout the 1960s she was a popular performer of her work.
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Tracy K Smith
Tracy K Smith is currently US Poet Laureate and teaches creative writing at Princeton University. She has published several poetry collections, including Life on Mars which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 and Wade in the Water (Penguin, 2018) which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in the UK. Her memoir Ordinary Light explores ideas of race, faith and her own creativity.
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Liz Soar
Liz Soar (b 1976) studied French at New College, Oxford and now teaches English at Headington School in Oxford. Her poem ‘She’s a game old bird’ was written on Claire Askew’s ‘Creatrix’ course with the Poetry School.
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Carla Sofia Ferreira
Carla Sofia Ferreira is an American poet and teacher from Newark, New Jersey. Her work has appeared in a large number of journals and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut collection is A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us (River River Books, 2024).
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Mahendra Solanki
Mahendra Solanki is a poet, editor and Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. He was born in Nairobi, moving to the UK as a child, and his poetry often draws on this background. His first collection was Shadows of My Making (1986) and his most recent is The Lies We Tell (2014). He has worked as poet-in-residence in a secure prison and for First Story at the Nottingham Children’s Hospital.
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