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.-
Liz Berry
Liz Berry was born in the Black Country and now lives in Birmingham. Her work is recognisable for its distinctive usage of Black Country dialect and vocabulary. Her pamphlet, The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls, was published in 2010 and her debut collection, Black Country (2014), won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in 2014.
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Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry is a prolific American poet and novelist who has published over 50 books of poetry, essays and fiction. He lives in Kentucky where he has run a farm for over 40 years and is also a passionate environmentalist. He has won numerous awards including the TS Eliot Prize and in 2010 received the National Humanities Medal from Barack Obama. His most recent poetry collection is This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems (Counterpoint LLC, 2014).
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Clare Best
Clare Best is a poet and poetry tutor whose first full collection Excisions was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. Her third and most recent collection is Beyond the Gate (Worple Press, 2023). In 2020 Clare completed an MA in Opera Making at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and was a Fellow there from 2020 – 2021.
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John Betjeman
John Betjeman (1906 – 1984) was a popular poet, writer and broadcaster, and passionate defender of Victorian architecture. His Collected Poems was published in 1958 and his verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells, in 1960. He was knighted in 1969, and became Poet Laureate in 1972.
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Kathryn Bevis
Kathryn Bevis (1975 – 2024) was an award-winning poet whose pamphlet, Flamingo, (Seren) was one of the Poetry Society’s ‘Books of the Year’ for 2022 and was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet. Her full collection, The Butterfly House, was published by Seren in 2024.
Poems by Kathryn won the Wales Poetry Award, the Crysse Morrison Award, and the Second Light Competition. One of her poems was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written – in 2023.
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Sujata Bhatt
Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad and grew up in both India and the US, speaking Gujarati as her first language. Her first poetry collection, Brunizem, appeared in 1988 and was first published in the UK by Carcanet in 2008. It won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award. Bhatt is bilingual, but her poetry often explores the rich and non-verbal worlds of plants and creatures.
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