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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Roy Fisher
Roy Fisher is a major figure in British poetry, considered by many to be one of the most important post-war English poets. One of the first poets to incorporate American and European poetics into the British tradition, Fisher’s early work, including City (1961), was immediately admired in the United States while in the UK the publication in 1981 of Poems 1955 – 1980 established his reputation as a leading experimental and innovative poet. This collection was followed by, amongst others, A Furnace (1986), Poems 1955-1987 (1988), The Dow Low Drop (1996), The Long And The Short Of It: Poems 1955 – 2005 (2005) and Standard Midland (2010). News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher edited by Peter Robinson and Robert Sheppard appeared in 2000, and a book of critical essays, The Thing about Roy Fisher, edited by John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson, was published the same year., In 2005 Roy Fisher was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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Gabriel Fitzmaurice
Gabriel Fitzmaurice is an Irish poet from County Kerry who has written more than twenty books, including poetry for adults and children in both English and Irish. His work for children includes But Dad! (Dublin, Poolbeg, 1995), Puppy and the Sausage (Poolbeg, 1998) and A Giant Never Dies (Poolbeg, 2002). He is also a translator and songwriter.
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John Foggin
John Foggin (1943 – 2023) was a British poet who lived in West Yorkshire. He worked as a teacher and lecturer and won numerous poetry awards including The Plough Prize in 2013 and 2014. His last collection was Pressed for Time (Calder Valley Poetry, 2022). During the pandemic he ran a project which led to the publication of When All This Is Over (Calder Valley Poetry, 2020) – an anthology in which 26 poets explore imaginary occupations.
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Carolyn Forché
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, translator, activist and teacher, perhaps best known for coining the term ‘poetry of witness’ which testifies to her belief that poetry can combine the personal with the political. Her first collection Gathering the Tribes (Yale University Press, 1975) was published when she was only twenty-four. Since then she has produced several further collections and gained an international following.
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Veronica Forrest-Thomson
Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947 – 1975) was a poet and critical theorist. She grew up in Glasgow and went to university in Liverpool and Cambridge . Her critical study Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry was published by Manchester University Press in 1978. Her poetry collections included Identi-kit (1967), Language-Games (1971) and the posthumous On the Periphery (1976). Collected Poems and Translations appeared in 1990 and Selected Poems in 1999. A further Collected Poems was published in 2008.
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Hannah Forward
Hannah Forward is a printmaker and painter living in Hove. She studied Graphic Design at university and worked as an illustrator for a number of years before a course in relief printmaking captured her imagination and prompted a change of direction. Her linocut print ‘Cassette Tapes’ was selected for the 2018 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, curated by Grayson Perry.
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