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.

  • 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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  • Lord Byron

    George Gordon Byron (1788 – 1824) inherited his title in 1798, along with his ancestral home of Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. A flamboyant and controversial figure, celebrated for his excesses, he became well-known with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812. He travelled widely, and lived for some time in Italy where he wrote some of his most famous works, including Don Juan (1819 – 1824). He died in Greece in 1824, supporting the Greek War of Independence.

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  • Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

    Alistair Te Ariki Campbell was a New Zealand poet, playwright and novelist. His collection Mine Eyes Dazzle (Pegasus, 1950) was the first by a Polynesian poet to be published in English. His output spans six decades, with his final collection (written with his wife Meg Campbell) published in 2008 just a year before his death.

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  • Nancy Campbell

    Nancy Campbell (b. 1978, UK) has conducted residencies at ecological and research institutions in Iceland, Denmark and the US, and is a Hawthornden Fellow. Her books include The Night Hunter (2011), Tikilluarit (2013) and How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic (2011), which received the Birgit Skiöld Award; her translations from Greenlandic have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

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  • Niall Campbell

    Niall Campbell is a Scottish poet originally from South Uist in the Western Isles. His first collection Moontide was published by Bloodaxe and won the inaugural Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize (2014). He has also published a US collection First Nights as part of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. He is now living in Leeds and working on a second UK collection.

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