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 over 850 historical and contemporary poets. In our pages you’ll find old favourites alongside twenty-first century voices – everyone from WH Auden to Belinda Zhawi. 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.-
Jessie Pope
Jessie Pope (1868 – 1941) was an English poet, writer and journalist based in Leicester and best known for her patriotic poetry encouraging enlistment in World War One. Her work came under scrutiny from poets such as Wilfred Owen, who dedicated his poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (1917) to her in direct response. She was a regular contributor to The Daily Mail, The Daily Express and Vanity Fair, and also wrote for children. Her poems are sometimes used in schools as a contrast to the work of war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.
Featured in
-
Katrina Porteous
Katrina Porteous was born in Aberdeen and now lives in Northumbria. She is a poet, historian and broadcaster and is perhaps best known for her innovative radio-poetry. Her work engages with ideas of nature and place. She is President of the Northumbrian Language Society and has written several poetry collections, including most recently Two Countries (Bloodaxe 2014).
Featured in
-
Peter Porter
Peter Porter (1929 – 2010) was Australian by birth but lived in Britain for most of his life. After his first collection of poetry was published in 1961, he published sixteen collections as well as holding Writer-in-Residence positions at several universities. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, won the Duff Cooper and the Whitbread prizes.
Featured in
-
Phoebe Power
Phoebe Power is a poet from Cumbria. Her collection Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018) won the Forward prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. A long poem about the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage Book of Days was published by Carcanet in 2022.
Featured in
-
Jack Powers
Jack Powers founded the Stone Soup poetry reading series in Boston in 1971, where many famous U.S. poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Robert Bly, performed their work. He was known for nurturing new talent and published many new poets under the name Stone Soup.
Featured in
-
Wendy Pratt
Wendy Pratt is a writer and editor who lives on the North Yorkshire coast. Her memoir The Ghost Lake was longlisted for the Nan Shepherd prize in 2021 and is inspired by an extinct lake in North Yorkshire. She has also published six poetry collections including Blackbird Singing at Dusk (Nine Arches, 2024). A previous collection, When I Think of My Body as a Horse, won the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet competition in 2020.
Featured in
