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.

  • Ada Limón

    Ada Limón is an American poet who has published five collections since her first in 2006. Her latest The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018) was named by the Washington Post named as one of its top five poetry books of the year. She studied creative writing at New York University and now teaches at Queens University of Charlotte. Her poems have also appeared in The New Yorker and Harvard Review.

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  • Grevel Lindop

    Grevel Lindop lives in Manchester and was professor of Romantic and Early Victorian Studies at Manchester University before taking up writing full-time. He has published several poetry collections and also writes reviews, articles, biography and travel books. His Literary Guide to the Lake District was reissued in 2005.

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  • Adam Lindsay Gordon

    Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833 – 1870) was born in England but emigrated to Australia when he was 20. He became a member of the mounted police, then a horse-breaker and steeplechase rider and later a politician. Two volumes of his poetry were published in 1867: Ashtaroth and Sea Spray and Smoke Drift. These were followed by Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes in 1870. That same year and following a spell of financial hardship he took his own life.

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  • Pippa Little

    Pippa Little is a Scottish poet now based in the north east. She has a PhD in contemporary women’s poetry from London University. A pamphlet, The Spar Box, was published by Vane Women in 2006 and was a PBS Pamphlet Choice. Her latest full collection, Twist, was published by Arc in 2017. Pippa was the winner of our robin postcard poem competition and her poem ‘Brou-Rhuddyn’ was produced as a limited edition postcard in 2018.

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  • Bryony Littlefair

    Bryony Littlefair studied English Literature and Philosophy at York University and now lives and works in London.  She was the winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet competition in 2017 and Giraffe was published by Seren. Her poems are witty and tender and always full of humanity.

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  • Liz Lochhead

    Liz Lochhead is a leading Scottish poet and dramatist. Named Poet Laureate of Glasgow in 2005 and Scots Makar in 2011, her first collection of poems, Memo for Spring (1972) won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. She has translated and adapted Molière’s Tartuffe (1985) into Scots, and her adaptation of Euripides’ Medea (2000) for Theatre Babel in 2000 won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. Her work for television includes Latin for a Dark Room and The Story of Frankenstein for Yorkshire Television. Her collections of poetry, The Colour of Black and White: Poems 1984-2003 and A Choosing: The Selected Poetry of Liz Lochhead, were published in 2003 and 2011 respectively.

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