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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Nikolay Gumilyov
Nikolay Gumilyov (1886 – 1921) was a poet, traveller, critic and military officer. He was married to the poet Anna Akhmatova until he was arrested and executed by the Russian Secret Police. He loved Africa and travelled there often; one of his most significant collections is The Tent (1921) which contains the famous poem ‘Giraffe.’ With fellow poet Ivanov he founded ‘The Guild of Poets’ – a group committed to the craft of making poems.
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Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn (1929 – 2004) published several collections of poetry both in the US and Britain, including The Man with Night Sweats (1992), Boss Cupid (2000) and a Collected Poems in 1994. His many accolades for poetry include the Forward Prize, a Rockefeller Award and the PEN (Los Angeles) Prize for Poetry.
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Sheila Hackney
Nothing is known of Sheila Hackney, which suggests that this may have been a nom de plume.
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Jen Hadfield
Jen Hadfield was born in Cheshire and is the author of two collections of poetry – Almanacs (2005) and the Poetry Book Society recommended Nigh-No-Place (2008), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. Both collections are published by Bloodaxe Books. She lives in Shetland.
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Hafiz
Hafiz (c. 1320 – 1389) or Hafez was a Persian mystic and lyric poet who followed the Sufi religion. His work expressed the miracle of divine love and inspiration, often using the ancient Arabic form of the ghazal. His most famous work is his Divan of Hafiz which is a collection probably put together after his death.
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Robert Hamberger
Robert Hamberger has published six poetry pamphlets and four full-length collections. Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize. His prose memoir with poems A Length of Road: finding myself in the footsteps of John Clare was published in 2021. He has been shortlisted and highly commended in the Forward prizes, and his poetry has appeared in a number of international anthologies, as well as in The Guardian as a Poem of the Week. He has also received a Hawthornden Fellowship.
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