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.

  • Alice Duer Miller

    Alice Duer Miller (1874 – 1942) was an American writer with a strong commitment to Feminism whose poetry influenced public opinion during the US Suffrage Movement. She also wrote verse novels, including The White Cliffs about an American woman in England widowed by the First World War. It sold over a million copies and was made into the 1944 film ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’.

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  • Carol Ann Duffy

    Carol Ann Duffy was appointed Poet Laureate in 2009. She has published several award-winning poetry collections, including The World’s Wife (1999), Feminine Gospels (2002) and Rapture (2005), and was awarded a CBE in 2001. She also writes poetry and picture books for children and is Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.

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  • Sasha Dugdale

    Sasha Dugdale was born in Sussex and is a poet and translator. She has published three collections of poetry of which the most recent is Red House (Carcanet, 2011). She has also translated Russian poetry and drama. Her translation of Plasticine by Vassily Sigarev, won the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. Her long poem ‘Joy’ about William and Catherine Blake won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.

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  • Denise Duhamel

    Denise Duhamel is an American poet who lives in Florida. She has published numerous collections of poetry, including Second Story (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) and Blowout (2013), which was a finalist for a National Books Critics Circle Award. She writes both free verse and fixed-form poems that explore a wide range of themes from feminism to American culture.

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  • Ian Duhig

    Ian Duhig was the eighth of eleven children born to Irish parents with a liking for poetry. He has won the National Poetry Competition twice and published several poetry collections including The Blind Roadmaker (2016) which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. He has held a number of Royal Literary Fund fellowships at universities across the UK, including at his own alma mater Leeds.

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  • Helen Dunmore

    Helen Dunmore (1952 – 2017) was born in Beverley and spent much of her life in Bristol. She wrote novels, short stories and children’s books, as well as poetry. She won the Orange Prize for her novel A Spell of Winter and her final poetry collection Inside the Wave (Bloodaxe, 2017) was a Costa Book of the Year. She had an abiding love of Cornwall and of the sea, and both feature regularly in her work.

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