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 800 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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Alison Brackenbury
Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953 and has worked as a librarian, a clerical assistant and in the family metal-finishing business. She has published numerous poetry collections, including most recently Skies (Carcanet, 2016). Her work reflects her love of nature and her lifetime relationship with horses.
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Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bradstreet (1612 – 1672) was born in Northamptonshire but emigrated to America with her husband and parents with the Winthrop Puritan group. She became one of the first poets to write English verse in the American colonies. Her work was published by her brother-in-law in England in 1650 under the title The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America. Her most admired work, a sequence of religious poems called Contemplations, was not published until the nineteenth century.
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Jo Brandon
Jo Brandon grew up in rural Lincolnshire and studied Creative Writing at Leeds University. Her debut poetry pamphlet Phobia was published by Valley Press in 2012, followed by her first full collection The Learned Goose (2015). Jo has been writer-in-residence at various literary festivals and was a BBC-funded development writer at West Yorkshire Playhouse.
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Kamau Brathwaite
Kamau Brathwaite (1930 – 2020) was a Barbadian poet and academic who studied at Cambridge University and the University of Sussex. He was a co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement and published numerous collections of poetry including The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973) and Slow Horses (2005) which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. He lived in both Barbados and New York.
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Jean Breeze
Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze (1956 – 2021) was a Jamaican dub poet (acknowledged as the first woman to work in the genre) and storyteller who was also a theatre director and actor. She published eight books of poetry and stories, and released several CDs, touring the world to perform her work. Her final collection The Verandah Poems was published by Bloodaxe in 2016.
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Alfred Brendel
Alfred Brendel is best known as a highly successful international pianist. He gave his first recital when he was only 17 and went on to record extensively, his repertoire ranging from Bach to Brahms and Schoenberg. His collection of absurd poetry One Finger Too Many was published in 1999. A second collection Cursing Bagels was published in English in 2004.
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