'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 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.

  • Moniza Alvi

    Moniza Alvi was born in Pakistan and grew up in England. She worked for some years as a secondary school teacher. Her poetry collections include Souls (2002), How the Stone Found Its Voice (2005) and Europa (2008), shortlisted for the 2008 TS Eliot Prize.

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  • Abeer Ameer

    Abeer Ameer grew up in Cardiff and trained as dentist before starting to write poetry. Her debut collection is Inhale/Exhale (Seren, 2021) in which she explores aspects of her Iraqi heritage. Her work has been widely published in journals and online.

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  • Romalyn Ante

    Romalyn Ante is a Filipino-British writer, based in Wolverhampton. Her poetry publications include the pamphlet Rice & Rain (V Press, 2018) and the full collection Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto and Windus, 2020). Her work has been broadcast on BBC radio and published in magazines including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. She also works full-time as a nurse practitioner.

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  • Sophia Argyris

    Sophia Argyris was born in Belgium to an English and Greek family. She grew up in Brussels until the age of nine, and then in the North of Scotland. She currently lives near Oxford, where she writes, and teaches yoga and meditation. Her work has been published widely in magazines and anthologies.  Her short collection How Do the Parakeets Stay Green? won the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize and was published in 2014 by Indigo Dreams.

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  • John Arlott

    John Arlott (1914 – 1991) was a journalist, author and cricket commentator for BBC’s Test Match Special. He was a popular authority on cricket, and known for his poetic phraseology when commentating. He was also a former police officer, wine connoisseur and poet, awarded an OBE in 1970.

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  • Simon Armitage

    Simon Armitage is the current Poet Laureate and alongside numerous poetry collections he has written novels and works of non-fiction. His first poetry book Zoom was published by Bloodaxe in 1989 and since then he has gone on to publish more than fifteen collections. His work regularly features on the GCSE English syllabus and in 2015 he became Oxford Professor of Poetry. He is also Professor of Poetry at Sheffield University.

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