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.

  • Robin Vaughan-Williams

    Robin Vaughan-Williams is from London, but moved to Sheffield in 1999, where he ran Spoken Word Antics for five years, including a radio show. His sequence ‘The Manager’ was published by Happenstance Press as a pamphlet in March 2010. After a spell in Iceland, he now lives in Nottingham, where he runs the Nottingham Writers’ Studio and is involved in organising the quarterly Word of Mouth live literature night.

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  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882) was one of the most popular US poets of his day.  He was the first Americans to completely translate Dante’s Divine Comedy and was one of the so-called ‘fireside poets’ of New England. One of his most famous works is ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ – an epic poem featuring native American characters.

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  • David Wagoner

    David Wagoner (1926 – 2021) was an American poet and novelist, born in Ohio to an opera singer mother. In his long life he published 23 poetry collections and 10 novels. Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems appeared in 1999 and the consensus among critics was that the new poems were among his very best. One of his recurring themes is nature and the destruction of the natural world.

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  • Derek Walcott

    Derek Walcott (1930 – 2017) published 24 collections of poetry, as well as dramas and works of criticism. He grew up in St Lucia and divided his time between Trinidad and Boston University where he taught Creative Writing. His collection, White Egrets (2010) won the T S Eliot Prize and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.

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  • Steve Waling

    Steve Waling is a British poet who was born in Accrington and lives in Manchester. He has published several collections, including Calling Myself On The Phone (Smith/Doorstop, 2003) and Travelator (Salt 2007). He has worked as a teacher of creative writing and as a mentor to African writers via the British Council’s Crossing Borders project.

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  • Jane Walker

    Jane Walker studied illustration and printmaking in Dundee and now works mostly as a printmaker using the reduction linocut technique. Her work reflects her fascination with still life and she uses everyday objects (jugs, flowers, cups) to capture a sense of the past. She is a member of Oxford Printmakers.

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