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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John Arlott
John Arlott (1914 – 1991) was a journalist, author and cricket commentator for BBC’s Test Match Special. He was a popular authority on cricket, and known for his poetic phraseology when commentating. He was also a former police officer, wine connoisseur and poet, awarded an OBE in 1970.
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Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage is the current Poet Laureate and alongside numerous poetry collections he has written novels and works of non-fiction. His first poetry book Zoom was published by Bloodaxe in 1989 and since then he has gone on to publish more than fifteen collections. His work regularly features on the GCSE English syllabus and in 2015 he became Oxford Professor of Poetry. He is also Professor of Poetry at Sheffield University.
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Martin Armstrong
Martin (Donisthorpe) Armstrong (1882 – 1974) was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and served in France in the First World War. He wrote in a variety of forms, in later years concentrating on fiction, but spent much of his early career writing poetry. He played a central role in the Georgian poetry movement in the 1920s.
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Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888) was a Victorian poet and social critic. After studying at Oxford he worked for many years as an inspector of schools. In 1857 he became Oxford Professor of Poetry and was the first in the role to give his lectures in English rather than Latin. One of his most famous poems is ‘The Scholar Gypsy’ which laments what he calls “the disease” of modern life.
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Mona Arshi
Mona Arshi is a poet and poetry tutor and worked as a human rights lawyer before she started writing poetry. In 2011 she completed an MA in Poetry at the University of East Anglia, after which her debut collection Small Hands (Pavilion, 2015) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Dear Big Gods was published in 2019 by University of Liverpool Press.
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John Ashbery
John Ashbery (1927 – 2017) was one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, winning almost every one of the country’s literary awards. His first collection was Some Trees (1957) which won a competition judged by WH Auden (later said that he hadn’t understood any of the poems). Ashbery’s later work was influenced by abstract expressionism and his experience as an art critic. He believed that poetry should reflect the fluidity and uncertainty of life.
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