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 800 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.

  • William Drummond of Hawthornden

    William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585 – 1649) was a Scottish poet. He studied Law at Edinburgh University but soon turned to writing poetry instead. His first publication was an elegy on the death of Henry, Prince of Wales which was published in 1613. He lived at Hawthornden Castle, which is now well-established as a literary retreat.

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  • Ann Drysdale

    Ann Drysdale (d. 2024) lived in South Wales. A prize-winning poet, she published several volumes of memoirs and a number of poetry collections, five of them published by Peterloo Poets. Her most recent collections are Between Dryden and Duffy (2005) and Quaintness and Other Offences (2009), the latter from Cinammon Press.

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  • Alice Duer Miller

    Alice Duer Miller (1874 – 1942) was an American writer with a strong commitment to Feminism whose poetry influenced public opinion during the US Suffrage Movement. She also wrote verse novels, including The White Cliffs about an American woman in England widowed by the First World War. It sold over a million copies and was made into the 1944 film ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’.

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  • Sasha Dugdale

    Sasha Dugdale was born in Sussex and is a poet and translator. She has published three collections of poetry of which the most recent is Red House (Carcanet, 2011). She has also translated Russian poetry and drama. Her translation of Plasticine by Vassily Sigarev, won the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. Her long poem ‘Joy’ about William and Catherine Blake won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.

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  • Denise Duhamel

    Denise Duhamel is an American poet who lives in Florida. She has published numerous collections of poetry, including Second Story (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) and Blowout (2013), which was a finalist for a National Books Critics Circle Award. She writes both free verse and fixed-form poems that explore a wide range of themes from feminism to American culture.

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  • Ian Duhig

    Ian Duhig was the eighth of eleven children born to Irish parents with a liking for poetry. He has won the National Poetry Competition twice and published several poetry collections including The Blind Roadmaker (2016) which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. He has held a number of Royal Literary Fund fellowships at universities across the UK, including at his own alma mater Leeds.

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