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 700 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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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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William Meredith
William Meredith (1919 – 2007) was an American poet who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was also a translator of Bulgarian and French poetry. He spent much of his life in New England, His first collection Love Letter from an Impossible Land (Yale University Press, 1944) was published when he was a young naval officer. He went on to publish several other collections, including two after suffering a major stroke. The William Meredith Foundation continues his legacy by promoting the reading and writing of poetry.
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James Merrill
James Merrill (1926 – 1995) was a New York-born poet who published his first collection The Black Swan at the age of only 20. In the course of his career he received numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for Divine Comedies (1976). He believed that his inspiration came from the world beyond and was a follower of mysticism and the occult.
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