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.

  • Ted Kooser

    Ted Kooser is an American poet and was the country’s 13th Poet Laureate from 2004 – 2006. His poetry is known for its celebration of the ordinariness of everyday life and is often deceptively plain and simple in its diction. His most recent publication is Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2018).

    Featured in

  • Beth Krommes

    Beth Krommes is an American painter, illustrator, wood engraver and pattern designer. She studied painting at Syracuse University, which included a year abroad at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. She also has a Degree in Textile/Surface Design. Her illustrations for the children’s title The House in the Night (Houghton Mifflin, 2008) by Susan Marie Swanson won a Caldecott Medal. She lives in New Hampshire.

    Featured in

  • Maxine Kumin

    Maxine Kumin (1925 – 2014) was an American poet. She had a long and successful writing career, in the course of which she won a Pulitzer Prize. She lived in a farmhouse in rural new Hampshire where she took pride in looking after her garden and her stable of horses. Collections such as Connecting the Dots: Poems (1996) focus on the daily rituals of farm life, while also broaching social and environmental problems such as pollution and religious persecution.

    Featured in

  • Zaffar Kunial

    Zaffar Kunial is a British poet born in Birmingham who now lives in Yorkshire. He published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust the same year. In 2011 he won third prize in the National Poetry Competition  with ‘Hill Speak’. For several years he worked as a writer for Hallmark Cards.

    Featured in

  • Stanley Kunitz

    Stanley Kunitz (1905 – 2006) became the tenth US Poet Laureate at the age of ninety-five. In 1959 he also received a Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems. A final volume Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected encompasses much of Kunitz’s later work, including nine new poems of which one is ‘The Wellfleet Whale’ addressing a finback whale run aground. This last book won a National Book Award.

    Featured in

  • Theophilus Kwek

    Theophilus Kwek currently lives in Singapore and began writing when he was a student at Raffles Institution. He has published three poetry collections, most recently Giving Ground (Ethos Books, 2016).  He is a co-Editor of Oxford Poetry and also co-edited Flight, an anthology of poetry in response to the European refugee crisis, published by the Oxford Students’ Oxfam Group.

    Featured in