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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Jim Burns
Jim Burns was born in Preston and left school at 16 to work in a cotton mill. He soon began writing poems and stories and publishing articles and reviews in The Guardian, the New Statesman and selected jazz magazines. His poetic style is conversational and infused with a strong sense of life in the north. Laying Something Down: Poems 1962-2007 was published by Shoestring Press in 2007 and the chapbook let’s do it by The Black Light Engine Room Press in 2018.
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Robert Burns
Robert Burns (1759 – 1796) was a poet and lyricist, widely regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement. Often viewed as the national poet of Scotland, he is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although he also wrote in English and a light Scots dialect that made his work accessible to an audience beyond Scotland.
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John Burnside
John Burnside is a poet and a prolific prose writer. His first collection of poems, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and in 2012 his collection Black Cat Bone won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize. He teaches at the University of St Andrews.
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Wayne Burrows
Wayne Burrows lives in Nottingham and is the author of several books of poetry, including The Apple Sequence (2011), and his most recent collection, Black Glass: New & Selected Poems (2015). He also writes fiction, his latest collection being Exotica Suite and Other Fictions (2015) and has made several short films, including Fantasmagorie (2015).
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Jeanette Burton
Jeanette Burton is a poet and English teacher from Derbyshire. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University. She was awarded first place in the McLellan Poetry Prize 2021 and the Ware Poetry Prize 2022, and was highly commended in both the Wales Poetry Award 2021and the Teignmouth Poetry Festival Open Competition 2022. Her pamphlet, What is this a family outing? was shortlisted for the inaugural Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition 2021. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Wales and Mslexia, and she is also a tutor for The Writing School.
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Derrick Buttress
Derrick Buttress was born in 1932. His poems have been widely published in magazines and in four collections by Shoestring Press; the latest, Welcome to the Bike Factory, in 2015. A memoir, Broxtowe Boy, was published in 2004, and its sequel, Music While You Work, in 2007. Sing to Me (2012) is his first collection of short stories. He has also written plays for BBC TV and Radio.
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