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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Ian McMillan
Ian McMillan is a poet, journalist, playwright and broadcaster and regularly presents BBC Radio 3’s weekly programme The Verb. In the 1970s he was active on the live poetry circuit and went on to publish several collections, both for adults and for children. To Fold the Evening Star: New And Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in 2016. He still lives in the South Yorkshire town where he was born.
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Hazel McNab
Hazel McNab is an artist and printmaker based in Cornwall. She makes reduction linocut prints, depicting wild landscapes as well as local flora and fauna. Many of her coastal images capture the sea’s repeating swirls and ripples, reflecting her fascination with colours and pattern and with light and shadows.
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Allison McVety
Allison McVety has published three collections of poetry, all with Smith/Doorstop. Her first collection, The Night Trotsky Came to Stay (2007), was the overall winner of the 2006 Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition, and was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize in 2008. Her poems have appeared in The Times, The Guardian, Poetry Review and Poetry London, have been broadcast on BBC radio and anthologised in the Forward Poems of the Decade 2002-2011 and The Best British Poetry, 2013. In 2011, she was winner of the National Poetry Competition.
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Paula Meehan
Paula Meehan is a distinguished Irish poet and playwright, who lives in Dublin. She has worked extensively with inner city communities and with prisoners, as well as teaching in universities. She is the author of seven award-winning poetry collections which have been translated into many languages, the latest being Geomantic (2016). From 2013 – 2016 she was Ireland Professor of Poetry.
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Hilary Menos
Hilary Menos is a British poet living in Devon. Her first collection Berg (Seren, 2009) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2010. She has published four pamphlets, most recently Fear of Forks (HappenStance, 2022). In 2016 she moved to France to renovate a 15th century Templar lodge with her partner, with whom she also runs The Friday Poem.
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George Meredith
George Meredith (1828 – 1909) was a notable Victorian novelist and poet. He started writing poetry in his 20s and was greatly influenced by Keats and Tennyson. His most significant work is Modern Love – a sequence of fifty 16-line ‘sonnets’ about the failure of a marriage, published in 1862. Like Thomas Hardy, he considered poetry to be his chief vocation but tends to be remembered more for his novels.
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