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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Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946) was an American writer who moved to Paris in 1903 and stayed there for the remainder of her life. She was a leading figure in the avant-garde and helped to launch the careers of Picasso and Matisse. She tried to achieve in her writing what contemporary painters were doing in their art: to create an experimental non-linear form that broke away from nineteenth century conventions of sense and chronology.
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AN Stencl
Abraham Nahum Stencl (1897 – 1983) was a Jewish poet born in Poland. He emigrated to Berlin in 1936, and subsequently on to Britain. His poetry was admired by many German writers and published in Yiddish and German. He settled in London where he founded the literary journal Loshn un Lebn. Many of his poems have been translated into English. All My Young Years, published in 2007 by Five Leaves Publications, includes a number of his poems printed in English and Yiddish.
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James Stephens
James Stephens (1880 – 1950) was born in Dublin. Alongside original poems he produced many retellings of Irish myths and fairy tales. His first poetry collection Insurrections was published in 1909 and his last Kings and the Moon in 1938. He spent the latter part of his life in London and gained popularity as a result of a series of broadcasts for the BBC.
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Kenneth Steven
Kenneth Steven is a writer and painter who has published 14 collections of poetry. He has written and presented several poetry programmes for BBC Radio including a feature on St Kilda which won a Sony Award in 2006. His most recent collection is A Song Among The Stones (Polygon, 2012). He lives in Argyll.
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Judy Stevens
Judy Stevens trained as a fine artist and printmaker at Hornsey College of Art. She enjoys working with traditional wood engraving and linocut techniques used by artists such as Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, as well as experimenting with modern computer-based approaches. She is inspired by the coastal scenery of Sussex and Suffolk and especially by life in Brighton where she is based.
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Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955) was a major American poet who in 1975 was described by the distinguished critic Harold Bloom as “the best and most representative American poet of our time” though his ground-breaking poetry only became generally recognised and acknowledged towards the end of his life. Whilst he was not a close member of any literary circles during his lifetime – his professional life was spent working in insurance law – his poems were strongly influenced by his life-long interest in modern literature and modern art more generally.
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