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.

  • Dorothy Wordsworth

    Dorothy Wordsworth (1771 – 1855) was the younger sister of the poet William Wordsworth. She enjoyed a close companionship with her brother, settling at Dove Cottage, Grasmere with him and his wife, Mary,  and later moving to Rydal Mount. She wrote travel journals and poetry, and has become famous for her posthumously published Grasmere Journal, a fascinating account of daily life, excursions and conversations with literary figures of the time.

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  • William Wordsworth

    William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) was born at Cockermouth in Cumbria and began publishing poetry in 1793. He collaborated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads, a book which marked the beginning of the Romantic Movement in English Poetry. He settled in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy and wife Mary, and his poems include the famous Daffodils and his long autobiographical poem, The Prelude, published after his death.

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  • David Wright

    David Wright (1920 – 1994) was born in South Africa but spent most of his life in the UK. He became deaf at the age of seven after contracting scarlet fever. His first poetry collection Poems was published in 1947 and a Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in 1997. He also published translations of Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales.

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  • James Wright

    James Wright (1927 – 1980) is widely considered to be one of the finest American poets of his generation, admired by both critics and fellow poets. He experimented with style and language but his themes – loneliness and alienation – remained the same. He published numerous collections, starting with The Green Wall (Yale University Press, 1957).  Above the River: The Complete Poems was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux twelve years after his death.

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  • Judith Wright

    Judith Wright (1915 – 2000) continues to be one of Australia’s best-loved poets. She published more than 50 books and was an active environmentalist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights. She believed that the poet should be concerned with national and social problems. Her Collected Poems was published in 2017.

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  • Kit Wright

    Kit Wright has written more than twenty-five books for adults and children.  He is also the winner of awards such as the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award and (jointly) the Heinemann Award. He was educated at Oxford, and then worked as a lecturer in Canada before returning to England in 1970, where he has remained since.

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