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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George MacBeth
George MacBeth (1932 – 1992) was a prolific writer who was born in Scotland, lived most of his life in England and died in Ireland. He worked for many years at the BBC as a producer of poetry programmes. His Selected Poems edited by Anthony Thwaite was published by Enitharmon in 2002. Like his contemporary Ted Hughes, his poetry often engages fiercely with the creatures of the natural world.
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Norman MacCaig
Norman MacCaig (1910 – 1996) was a renowned Scottish poet who was born in Edinburgh and subsequently divided his time between there and Assynt in the West Highlands. He registered as a conscientious objector during the Second World War and remained a lifelong pacifist. His first collection of poetry was published in 1943. In 1985 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He was made an OBE in 1979.
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Hugh MacDiarmid
Hugh MacDiarmid (CM Grieve) (1892 – 1978) was Scotland’s most influential and controversial writer in the 20th century. He urged and enabled the regeneration of all aspects of Scotland’s literature and culture through his poetry, polemical writing and political activity. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) is generally regarded as Scotland’s masterpiece of modernism.
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Robert Macfarlane
Robert Macfarlane is well-known as a writer about landscape and the natural world. His prose books include Mountains of the Mind (Granta, 2008) and The Old Ways (Penguin, 2013) about ancient footpaths and rights of way. The Lost Words (Hamish Hamilton, 2017) is a picture book collaboration with the artist Jackie Morris, celebrating the power of words that belong to the natural world. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
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Hilke MacIntyre
Hilke MacIntyre was born in Germany and studied architecture at the College for Art & Design in Kiel before moving to Scotland in 1995. Since then she has concentrated on printing, painting and ceramics. Her work is widely exhibited in galleries throughout Britain and has been selected many times for the annual show at the Royal Scottish Academy.
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Gearóid MacLochlainn
Gearóid MacLochlainn was born in Belfast in 1966 and writes in both English and Irish. His third poetry book, Sruth Teangacha / Stream of Tongues (2002), is a dual-language collection. As well as being writer-in-residence at both Queens University and the University of Ulster, he has written books for children in Irish and regularly gives workshops, readings and interviews about Irish language arts in Northern Ireland.
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