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 Ormond
John Ormond (1923 – 1990) was a Welsh poet, film-maker and journalist who also worked for BBC Wales’s fledgling news service. His first collection Indications (Grey Walls Press) was published in 1943, after which there was a gap of more than 20 years before his next. A Collected Poems appeared posthumously in 2015. Much of his work explores his Welsh roots and is concerned with family, locality and the natural world.
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Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Ostriker is a poet and academic who was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in the Manhattan housing projects during the Great Depression. She is widely known as a writer of Jewish feminist poetry and was one of the first American poets to make motherhood a subject. Her first poetry collection Songs: A Book of Poems was published by Holt Rinehart and Winston in 1969 and her most recent Waiting for the Light (University of Pittsburgh Press) in 2017.
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Alice Oswald
Alice Oswald read Classics at Oxford before training as a gardener. She published her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, in 1996. It won the Forward Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 1997. Her second collection, Dart, won the TS Eliot Prize in 2002. Memorial, her poetic reworking of Homer’s The Iliad was received with unanimous critical acclaim in 2011. She lives in Devon.
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Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 in Oswestry. He enlisted in 1915, serving in France, then was admitted with shell shock to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he met fellow poet, Siegfried Sassoon. He returned to the Front and was awarded the Military Cross in 1918, before being killed a week before Armistice. He became one of the greatest poets of the First World War, most of his poetry written between 1917 and 1918 and published posthumously.
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James P Lenfestey
James P Lenfestey is an American poet and former journalist based in Minneapolis who has published several collections including A Cartload of Scrolls:100 Poems in the Manner of T’ang Dynasty Poet Han-Shan (Holy Cow! Press, 2007). He chairs the Literary Witnesses poetry programme.
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Jenny Pagdin
Jenny Pagdin’s first collection is The Snow Globe, published by Nine Arches Press in 2024. A pamphlet Caldbeck (Eyewear, 2017) was shortlisted in the Mslexia pamphlet competition. Her poems have been highly commended and shortlisted in the Bridport Prize and published in magazines including Magma, Ambit, The Stand and Ink, Sweat & Tears, as well as in an Emma Press anthology.
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