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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Karen McCarthy Woolf
Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to English and Jamaican parents. She has published two poetry collections, both to great critical acclaim: An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, 2014) and Seasonal Disturbances (Carcanet, 2017) – the latter partly written while she was Poet In Residence at the National Maritime Museum. She has edited five literary anthologies, been selected for Poems on the Underground and her work has also been dropped from a helicopter over the Houses of Parliament.
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Michael McCarthy
Michael McCarthy (1945 – 2018) was a poet and a Catholic priest who worked in North Yorkshire. He grew up on a farm in Cork and his first poetry collection Birds’ Nests and Other Poems (Bradshaw Books, 2003) won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. He also wrote several children’s books which have been translated into seventeen languages.
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Thomas McCarthy
Thomas McCarthy was born in County Waterford in 1954 and educated at University College Cork. He worked for many years as a librarian before turning to writing full-time. His latest collection, Pandemonium, was published by Carcanet in 2016. His work has been translated into several languages and he has won literary prizes including the Patrick Kavanagh Award and the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Prize.
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Rebecca McClanahan
Rebecca McClanahan is an American writer, poet and educator. She has published memoirs and books of essays about creative writing. Her first poetry collection was Mother Tongue published in 1987 by University of Florida Press. Deep Light: New and Selected Poems, 1987-2007 (Iris Books, 2007) followed in 2007.
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John McCrae
Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander McCrae (1872 – 1918) was a Canadian doctor, teacher and poet who grew up in Ontario. ‘In Flanders Fields’ is his most famous poem and it is almost the last one that he wrote. He was involved in the Second Battle of Ypres, during which one of his close friends was killed. The poem was inspired by noticing poppies blooming on the makeshift graves the day after his friend was buried.
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John McCullough
John McCullough lives in Hove on the south coast. His latest book of poems, Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins) won the 2020 Hawthornden prize for literature and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award.
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