Candlestick Press – 'Instead of a card' poetry pamphlets | UK based independent publisher

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 850 historical and contemporary poets. In our pages you’ll find old favourites alongside twenty-first century voices – everyone from WH Auden to Belinda Zhawi. 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.

  • Molly Thapviwat

    Molly Thapviwat is a poet, writer, and English teacher based in Bangkok, Thailand. Her work has been recognised in the Slipstream Poetry Competition 2025 (Highly Commended), the Welsh Poetry Competition 2025 (Special Mention), and other international contests. Her poems have appeared in trampset and are forthcoming in The MacGuffin and Frontier Poetry. She is currently working on her debut collection and a first novel. Outside her writing, she performs as ‘Elvis Little Sister’ – one of the few professional female Elvis tribute artists worldwide.

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  • Laura Theis

    Laura Theis’ work appears in Poetry, Oxford Poetry, Magma, Rattle, Aesthetica, iamb, etc. Her Elgin-Award-nominated debut how to extricate yourself (2020), an Oxford Poetry Library Book-of-the-Month, won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize. A Spotter’s Guide To Invisible Things (2023) received the Live Canon Collection Prize and the Society of Authors’ Arthur-Welton-Award. Other accolades include the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, Poets & Players Prize, Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, AM Heath Prize, and Mogford Prize. Her new collection Introduction to Cloud Care and her children’s debut Poems from a Witch’s Pocket are both forthcoming in 2025.

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  • Dylan Thomas

    Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953) was a leading Welsh poet and writer, many of whose poems remain very well known and popular.  These include  ‘Fern Hill’, ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ and ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’. His play for voices, ‘Under Milk Wood’, is also widely known and loved.

    dylanthomas.com

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  • Edward Thomas

    Edward Thomas (1878 – 1917) was an Anglo-Welsh writer of reviews, literary criticism, biography and fiction, who turned to poetry in 1914, and is best remembered for his evocative poems about the English countryside. He was killed in action in the First World War.

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  • Oenone Thomas

    Oenone Thomas is a poet and chocolatier who was brought up in Wales and Spain and now lives in the south of England. She was Poet in Residence for the Cuckmere Pilgrim Path 2024 – 25 and her first collection Self-Portrait as Scallop Shell reflects on this experience. Her work has been widely published in magazines and she has been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition.

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  • RS Thomas

    RS Thomas (1913 – 2000) was a passionate advocate of Welsh nationalism and a major European poet.   He was ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church of Wales in 1936 and had written three collections of poetry before his breakthrough to a wider audience in 1955 with the publication of Song at the Year’s Turning.  Reflecting wild and remote areas of countryside in Wales, his poetry is admired for its spiritual, spare and lyrical qualities.

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