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.-
Zaffar Kunial
Zaffar Kunial is a British poet born in Birmingham who now lives in Yorkshire. He published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust the same year. In 2011 he won third prize in the National Poetry Competition with ‘Hill Speak’. For several years he worked as a writer for Hallmark Cards.
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Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Kunitz (1905 – 2006) became the tenth US Poet Laureate at the age of ninety-five. In 1959 he also received a Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems. A final volume Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected encompasses much of Kunitz’s later work, including nine new poems of which one is ‘The Wellfleet Whale’ addressing a finback whale run aground. This last book won a National Book Award.
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Theophilus Kwek
Theophilus Kwek currently lives in Singapore and began writing when he was a student at Raffles Institution. He has published three poetry collections, most recently Giving Ground (Ethos Books, 2016). He is a co-Editor of Oxford Poetry and also co-edited Flight, an anthology of poetry in response to the European refugee crisis, published by the Oxford Students’ Oxfam Group.
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Vanessa Lampert
Vanessa Lampert is a poet and acupuncturist from Oxfordshire. Her debut pamphlet On Long Loan was published by Live Canon and her first full collection will be published by Seren in Spring 2023. Vanessa has been published widely, including in Magma, The Moth, Spoonfeed, Quince and The Oxford Times. She has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University and Poetry School London.
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Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin (1922 – 85) was a major British poet famed for his “piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent” (Jean Hartley, Marvell Press). Born in Coventry, he studied English at the University of Oxford, and worked as a librarian, most notably at the library of the University of Hull from 1955. His collection of poetry, The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1965) and High Windows (1974), established him as a leading and much-loved poet, despite his relatively slim output. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1965 and offered – though he declined the offer – the post of Poet Laureate in 1984.
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Leah Larwood
Leah Larwood is a poet, magazine writer and trainee gestalt psychotherapist and poetry therapist. Her work has been widely published by a number of literary magazines and placed in various competitions. Her poems often explore dreams and sleep and have been described as “dark, mythical and haunting”. She lives on the edge of the Norfolk Broads with her partner, eight year-old daughter and their chatty chocolate-point Siamese.
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