'Instead of a card' poetry pamphlets | UK based independent publisher

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.

  • Susan Hamlyn

    Susan Hamlyn has published two collections of poetry, The Only Thing Untouched (Flarestack, 2000) and Quiet Myth (Mattock Press, 2000). Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. She lives in London.

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  • Mary Stewart Hammond

    Mary Stewart Hammond is an American poet. Her first collection Out of Canaan was published in 1993 and her most recent Entering History (which chronicles a long marriage) in 2016. She teaches poetry Masterclasses in New York where she lives.

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  • Jenny Hancock

    Jenny Hancock is a painter and printmaker living in rural Cheshire. Her work reflects her love of plants, wildlife the garden and the changing seasons. Both her paintings and linocut prints have a bold use of colour and feature the flora and fauna from her own garden, the surrounding countryside and her visits to many inspirational gardens.

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  • Nathalie Handal

    Nathalie Handal grew up in Latin America, France and the Middle East. Her most recently published collection is Life in a Country Album (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) which won the Palestine Book Award. Her work has been translated into 15 languages and she is a Professor at New York University. She edited the anthology The Poetry of Arab Women, which introduced Arab women poets to a wider audience and was named one of the top 10 Feminist Books by The Guardian.

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  • Shasta Hanif Ali

    Shasta Hanif Ali is a Pakistani Scottish writer and poet. Her writing delicately navigates the legacy of race and heritage; where themes of memory and language interlace and disrupt. Shasta’s writing has been published in the Association for Scottish Literature, Federation of Writers Scotland, Sidhe Press and Our Time Is A Garden (IASH), among others. Recently Shasta was nominated as one of Edinburgh’s 100 trail blazing women past and present, and honoured in a mural which exhibited across Edinburgh.

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  • Sophie Hannah

    Sophie Hannah has published five collections of poetry, all with Carcanet Press.  Her most recent collection, Pessimism for Beginners, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 2007 and her poetry is now studied in the UK at GCSE and A-Level. She is also a writer of international best-selling psychological thrillers and is Fellow Commoner at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. 

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