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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Keith Douglas
Keith Douglas was born in 1920 and studied at Oxford University under Edmund Blunden, before enlisting and being posted to the Middle East in 1941. He returned to England in 1943 to take part in the Invasion of Normandy and was killed three days after D Day, aged 24. Initially little known as a War poet, his reputation has since grown gradually. His Collected Poems was published in 1951.
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Rita Dove
Rita Dove is a leading American poet whose debut collection The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) was praised for its sense of history and individual detail. In 1993 she became US Poet Laureate and was the youngest person to be elected to the position. She is widely published and her verse drama Thomas and Beulah (1986) won the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written fiction and short stories.
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Joan Downar
Joan Downar lived in Nottinghamshire. Her poetry career began in the 1970s, her work appearing in major poetry journals. Peterloo Press published two of her collections: The Empire of Light (1984) and The Old Noise of Truth (1989). Various Returns is a posthumous collection of poems which were unpublished at the time of her death in 1996. It was compiled and edited by Michael Payne.
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Boris Dralyuk
Boris Dralyuk is an award-winning literary translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA, where he taught Russian literature for a number of years. He is a co-editor of the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, and has translated Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, both of which are published by Pushkin Press.
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William Drummond of Hawthornden
William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585 – 1649) was a Scottish poet. He studied Law at Edinburgh University but soon turned to writing poetry instead. His first publication was an elegy on the death of Henry, Prince of Wales which was published in 1613. He lived at Hawthornden Castle, which is now well-established as a literary retreat.
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Ann Drysdale
Ann Drysdale (d. 2024) lived in South Wales. A prize-winning poet, she published several volumes of memoirs and a number of poetry collections, five of them published by Peterloo Poets. Her most recent collections are Between Dryden and Duffy (2005) and Quaintness and Other Offences (2009), the latter from Cinammon Press.
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