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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John Lucas
John Lucas is a poet, critic, biographer and author of literary and critical works. His books include several books of poetry including Flute Music (2006), The Long and the Short Of It (2004) and A World Perhaps: New and Selected Poems (2002). He runs Shoestring Press and is Professor Emeritus at the Universities of Loughborough and Nottingham Trent.
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Aileen Lucia Fisher
Aileen Lucia Fisher (1906 – 2002) is the author of more than one hundred books for children, including poetry, biography, natural history and plays. Her poetry publications include The Coffee-Pot Face (1933), which was a Junior Literary Guild Selection. For more than 30 years she lived on a ranch in Boulder, Colorado surrounded by the rural landscape she loved.
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Roddy Lumsden
Roddy Lumsden (1966 – 2020) was born in St. Andrews to working class parents who instilled in him an early love of reading. He spent the later years of his life in London where he taught at the Poetry School. He published a number of poetry collections with Mischief Night: New and Selected Poems appearing in 2004. His last collection So Glad I’m Me (2017) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize.
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Carola Luther
Carola Luther grew up in South Africa and moved to England in 1981. She works in Leeds and lives in the Yorkshire Pennines. Her first collection Walking the Animals was published by Carcanet in 2004 and was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her follow-up Arguing with Malarchy (2011) features poems of landscape and others which explore how animals and humans communicate without language.
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Thomas Lux
Thomas Lux (1946 – 2017) was an American poet who published fourteen collections of poetry and is known for his direct, plain-speaking style. His first collection was Memory’s Handgrenade (Pym-randall, 1972) and To the Left of Time (Houghton Mifflin, 2016) was his last. His early work was influenced by surrealism but he became more interested in human experience and his later poems explore the sorrows and absurdities of being alive.
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Claire Lynn
Claire Lynn teaches Creative Writing around Northumberland. Her poems have been placed in various competitions including the Bridport Prize (1999) and Wasafiri (2017), published in various anthologies including Virago’s The Nerve, and magazines such as Butcher’s Dog. Her poem Sixteen Summers was commissioned by the Ilkley Literature Festival 2022 and Crossing to Lindisfarne is currently (2024 – 25) displayed on a poster at Longbenton Metro station in Newcastle upon Tyne. She won the Mist and Mountain International Poetry Prize in 2023.
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