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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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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Michael Longley
Michael Longley (1939 – 2025) was born in Belfast and was one of the giants of contemporary poetry in Ireland. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2007 to 2010 and published numerous collections since his first, Ten Poems, appeared in 1965. He won all the major poetry prizes and his 2014 collection The Stairwell won the International Griffin Prize. His work is infused with the stories of the classical world and with the subtle details of nature.
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Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde (1934 – 1992) was born in new York City of West Indian parents and described herself as a ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,’ writing to address the injustices of racism, sexism and homophobia. Her Collected Poems was published in 1997 and she was Poet Laureate of New York from 1991-1992. She also wrote prose and was an active supporter of women in South Africa under apartheid.
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Hannah Lowe
Hannah Lowe’s first poetry collection Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013) won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the Forward, Aldeburgh and Seamus Heaney Best First Collection Prizes. Her second collection Chan was published in 2016. Her family memoir Long Time, No See featured as a Radio 4 Book of the Week.
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Amy Lowell
Amy Lowell (1874 – 1925) was an American poet, translator, performer and editor. Her first collection A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass was published in 1912. She wrote over 650 poems in the space of only twelve years and is also remembered for her work in bringing modernism (and specifically Ezra Pound’s Imagism) to the attention of American readers. She also wrote a 1300-page biography of Keats.
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