Candlestick Press – 'Instead of a card' poetry pamphlets | UK based independent publisher

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 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.

  • Alice Pattullo

    Alice Pattullo is an artist and illustrator based in London. Her distinctive and vivid style has proved highly popular and she has created illustrations for clients including the National Trust, the V&A Museum and Fortnum and Mason. Her work is inspired by British traditions and folklore and features domestic themes alongside more fantastical representations of creatures and characters.

    alicepattullo.com

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  • Stephen Payne

    Stephen Payne was born in Merthyr Tydfil and lives in Penarth, South Glamorgan. His first full collection, Pattern Beyond Chance, was published in 2015 by HappenStance Press and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. His second collection, The Windmill Proof, was published by the same press in September 2021 and followed, in February 2022 by a pamphlet The Wax Argument & Other Thought Experiments.

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  • MR Peacocke

    MR Peacocke grew up in South Devon and started writing poems as a child. Peterloo Poets published her first four poetry collections: Marginal Land (1988), Selves (1995), Speaking of the Dead (2003) and In Praise of Aunts (2007). Caliban Dancing and Finding the Planes: New and Selected Poems were both published by Shoestring, the latter in 2015.

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  • Cheryl Pearson

    Cheryl Pearson is a British poet who lives and works in Manchester. Her poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies and her first full collection Oysterlight was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. She has won the High Sheriff’s Cheshire Prize for Literature in 2016 and in 2017 was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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  • Pascale Petit

    Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French/Welsh/Pakistani heritage. She worked as a sculptor before turning to poetry. Her seventh poetry collection Mama Amazonica, published by Bloodaxe in 2017, was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Her work has been widely translated and is characterised by the opulence and vividness of its image-making.

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  • Mario Petrucci

    Mario Petrucci is an early founder and leading proponent of Ecopoetry. Performer, academic, environmentalist and PhD physicist, as well as translator, educator and broadcaster, his many awards include the Arvon Prize, Bridport Prize, Irish Times Perpetual Trophy, and London Writers Competition (four times). Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl (Enitharmon) was hailed as “heartfelt, ambitious and alive” by The Daily Telegraph and “poetry on a geological scale” by Verse (USA). Petrucci’s sustained mediations between ecology and poetry – particularly via the UN – galvanise the role of the arts in environmental discourse. In 2026, Petrucci was appointed Ecopoetry Network Coordinator for the Planetary Arts Movement by the World Academy of Art and Science.

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