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 over 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.

  • Iain McIntosh

    Iain McIntosh is a Scottish artist and illustrator who was born in Motherwell and now lives in Edinburgh, having studied at Edinburgh College of Art. He uses both traditional and digital techniques to create logos, illustrations and book jacket designs, including for best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith.  He is married with two children.

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  • Claude McKay

    Claude McKay (1890 – 1948) was a Jamaican writer and poet who moved to the US in 1912. He was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a literary movement that flourished in the 1920s. Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads were published in London in 1912. His later collection, Harlem Shadows (1922) was an important book in the Harlem Renaissance.

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  • Flora McLachlan

    Flora McLachlan is an artist and printmaker living near the Preseli mountains in West Wales. She makes etchings, lithographs and block prints as well as paintings. Her work is inspired by the natural world and by the fairy tales she read in her childhood. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and prints her own work on direct lithograph presses and Rochat etching presses.

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  • Paul McLoughlin

    Paul McLoughlin (1947 – 2021) was born in London of Irish parents and has published four collections of poetry, the most recent being The Hungarian Who Beat Brazil (Shoestring, 2017).  He also wrote articles and reviews for various publications, including PN Review and Critical Survey and his poetry is widely anthologised.

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  • Hugh McMillan

    Hugh McMillan is from Penpont in south-west Scotland. He has published five collections of poetry and won a number of prizes, including the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award in 2017 for Sheep Penned. He has been a winner in the Smith/Doorstop Prize and the Cardiff International Poetry Competition, and has also been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award and the Basil Bunting Award.

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  • Ian McMillan

    Ian McMillan is a poet, journalist, playwright and broadcaster and regularly presents BBC Radio 3’s weekly programme The Verb. In the 1970s he was active on the live poetry circuit and went on to publish several collections, both for adults and for children. To Fold the Evening Star: New And Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in 2016. He still lives in the South Yorkshire town where he was born.

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