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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Dorothea Smartt
Dorothea Smartt is a performance artist and poet of Barbadian heritage, based in South London. Her poetry draws upon Caribbean identities, memories and myth. She has published several collections of poetry, including most recently Ship Shape (Peepal Tree Press, 2011) and has been Poet in Residence at Brixton Market and Live Artist at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
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Catherine Smith
Catherine Smith is a teacher and writer of poetry, fiction and radio drama, based in East Sussex. Her collection Lip was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. She has published several other collections including most recently The New Cockaigne (The Frogmore Press, 2014). Jellybelly, a supernatural rom-com, was broadcast May 2005.
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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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