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.

  • Harry Graham

    Harry Graham, or Jocelyn Henry Clive ‘Harry’ Graham (1874 – 1936) was an English writer and journalist. After serving in the Boer and First World Wars, he became a leading lyricist for operettas and musical comedies. However, he is best known as a writer of dark humorous verse.

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  • Virginia Graham

    Virginia Graham (1910 – 1993) was a writer of poetry, journalism and essays, best known for her 1946 poetry collection Consider the Years, about her life during the Second World War. She was the daughter of Harry Graham and  a close friend of Joyce Grenfell, with whom she collaborated.

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  • WS Graham

    WS Graham (1918 – 1986) was born in Scotland and lived much of his life in Cornwall, many of his friends belonging to the artistic community of St Ives. His work was held in particular regard by TS Eliot, Harold Pinter and by many later poets. In 1999 Carcanet Press published The Nightfisherman, selected letters of WS Graham and in 2005 Faber and Faber published his New Collected Poems which incorporated two posthumous collections along with earlier published work. He was described by Peter Porter as, ‘One of the most original poets of his time’.

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  • SL Grange

    SL Grange is a poet, theatre-maker and multi-disciplinary artist. They won the Poetry Wales pamphlet competition in 2021 and a pamphlet bodies, and other haunted houses was published by Seren in 2022. Recent work includes A Note to Mary Frith, commissioned by Shakespeare’s Globe for the Notes to Forgotten She-Wolves series.

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  • Mark Granier

    Mark Granier is an Irish poet living in Bray, Co Wicklow. His poems have appeared in numerous outlets in Ireland and the UK, including Poetry Review, The New Statesman and Carol Ann Duffy’s WRITE Where We Are NOW pandemic project for Manchester University.  His fifth collection, Ghostlight: New & Selected Poems, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2017.

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  • Robert Graves

    Robert Graves (1895 – 1985) was a major poet, novelist critic and historian. He was a prolific writer, producing more than 140 works during his lifetime.  Well known as the author of I, Claudius, and Claudius the God as well as his memoir Goodbye to All That, which detailed his experiences during the First World War, he is also remembered as a fine war poet, and commemorated as such in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

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