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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Arthur Symons
Arthur Symons (1865 – 1945) was a British poet, translator and critic. He was born in Wales but spent most of his life in London. A two-volume collected Poems appeared in 1902, after which he wrote almost nothing due to ill health. His work explores love, loss and the passage of time. His seminal book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) introduced Symbolism to a British readership.
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George Szirtes
George Szirtes was born in Budapest and left Hungary in 1956. His first book, The Slant Door, was published in 1979 and won the Faber Memorial Prize. Since then he has published numerous collections, including Reel which won the TS Eliot Prize in 2015 and, most recently, Mapping the Delta (Bloodaxe, 2016). He has also translated poetry, fiction and other work, chiefly from Hungarian. He teaches at the University of East Anglia.
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Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska (1923 – 2012) was a Polish poet, essayist and translator who won the Nobel Prize in 1996. Her poetry examines domestic details and occasions, playing these against the backdrop of history. Collections that have been translated into English include Monologue of a Dog (2005).
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Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941) was born in Calcutta. A Bengali polymath, he was a cultural giant who wrote poetry, prose, dramas and music and painted some 2,500 paintings. He wrote his first poems at the age of eight and in 1913 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first Asian person to win the honour.
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David Tait
David Tait lives in Guangzhou, China, where he works as a teacher. His pamphlet Love’s Loose Ends won the Poetry Business pamphlet competition in 2010. His 2014 collection Self-Portrait with The Happiness was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. He was ‘house poet’ at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre from 2010 – 2013.
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James Tate
James Tate (1943 – 2015) was an American poet. His first collection was The Lost Pilot (Yale University Press, 1967) an elegy for his father who was shot down over Germany in 1944 when Tate was only four months old. His subsequent poetry rarely drew on his own experiences and he became known for poems characterised by humour and his love of the tall story. He won many awards including the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for his Selected Poems.
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