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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Peter Sansom
Peter Sansom is a poet, tutor and founder of the Poetry Business and the publisher Smith/Doorstop, both based in Sheffield. His publications include On the Pennine Way (Littlewood, 1988) and Everything You’ve Heard is True (Carcanet, 1990), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. For a while he was Writer in Residence with Marks & Spencer. He is also author of the influential book Writing Poems, first published by Bloodaxe in 1993
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Jacqueline Saphra
Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright and teacher. Recent collections are All My Mad Mothers, shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot prize and Dad, Remember You are Dead (2019), both from Nine Arches Press. A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller (2017) and Veritas: Poems after Artemisia (2020) were published by Hercules Editions. Her most recent play, The Noises was nominated for a Standing Ovation Award. One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets was published by Nine Arches Press in 2021. She teaches and mentors for The Poetry School.
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Sappho
Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, probably around 620-550 BC. In antiquity, she was considered a great lyric poet, referred to by Plato as ‘the tenth Muse’, her likeness appearing on coins. Her work was first published around third century BC, but much of it was lost for years, until papyri fragments of her poems first began to be discovered in 1898.
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May Sarton
May Sarton (1912 – 1995) was born in Belgium, and grew up in the US. Her writing career began in the 1930s and she published poetry, memoir and novels during her lifetime. Her memoir, Journal of a Solitude, was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Her last poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994.
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Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967) was an English poet and author who served on the Western Front, was awarded the Military Cross and became one of the leading poets of World War One, also having a significant influence on the work of poet Wilfred Owen. His Collected Poems 1908-1956 was published by Faber and Faber in 1961. He also wrote fictionalised autobiographical books, the first of which was Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, published in 1928.
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Tom Sastry
Tom Sastry’s poems have been featured in The Guardian and highly commended in the Forward Prize. His pamphlet Complicity (smith/doorstop, 2016) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and a Poetry School Book of the Year. His collection A Man’s House Catches Fire (Nine Arches Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. He is working on his second collection.
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