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.-
Paul McDonald
Paul McDonald taught at the University of Wolverhampton for 25 years, where he ran the Creative Writing Programme, before taking early retirement in 2019. He is the author of 20 books to date, which includes fiction, poetry and scholarship. His most recent poetry collection is 60 Poems (Greenwich Exchange Press, 2023)
Featured in
-
Andrew McDonnell
Andrew McDonnell is a writer of poetry and short fiction who teaches at the University Centre Peterborough. His published work includes The Somnambulist Cookbook (Salt, 2019) and 55 Devotionals (Against Erasure) (Broken Sleep Books, 2025).
Featured in
-
Beth McDonough
Beth McDonough is a Dundee-based poet who co-hosts Platform Sessions in Fife. Her pamphlet Lamping for pickled fish is published by 4Word. Makar of the Federation of Writers (Scotland) in 2022, currently she’s working on a hybrid project on outdoor swimming, and a collaborative collection with Nikki Robson. Both books are scheduled for publication this year.
Featured in
-
Gill McEvoy
Gill McEvoy lives in Devon. She won the 2015 Michael Marks Award for The First Telling (Happenstance Press). She has also published two collections with Cinnamon Press: The Plucking Shed (2010) and Rise (2013). She is one of six featured poets in Caboodle published by Prole Books and is also a Hawthornden Fellow.
Featured in
-
Roy McFarlane
Roy McFarlane is a poet and playwright born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage. He is the National Canal Laureate and a former Birmingham Poet Laureate. His debut collection, Beginning With Your Last Breath, was followed by The Healing Next Time which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. His third collection Living by Troubled Waters was published in 2022.
Featured in
-
Roger McGough
Roger McGough was born in Liverpool in 1937. He sold over a million records as one of The Scaffold in the late 1960s, and has since led a wide-ranging and successful poetry career, publishing over forty poetry collections for children and adults. He was made President of the Poetry Society in December 2011 and presents Radio 4’s Poetry, Please.
Featured in
