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.

  • Anna Akhmatova

    Anna Akhmatova (1889 – 1966) is the pen-name of Anna Andreevna Gorenko who was born near the Black Sea port of Odessa, to an upper-class family. She is widely recognised as one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century and was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965. Her work ranges from short lyric poems to longer cycles such as Requiem which explores Stalin’s rule of terror.

    Featured in

  • Carry Akroyd

    Carry Akroyd is a painter and printmaker living on the Cambridgeshire/Northamptonshire border. Her work reflects her local arable landscapes and the wildlife that lives there. She also has an affinity with the local Northamptonshire poet John Clare and has illustrated three collections of his poetry. She was President of the John Clare Society in 2016.

    Featured in

  • Marjorie Allen Seiffert

    Marjorie Allen Seiffert (1885 – 1970) was an American poet who is widely anthologised and had many poems published in The New Yorker during her lifetime. Her collections include The Name of Life (Scribner, 1938). She also wrote under pseudonyms such as Angela Cypher and Elijah Hay, the latter being a poet belonging to a fake literary movement called Spectrism.

    Featured in

  • Rachael Allen

    Rachael Allen was born in Cornwall and moved to London to study English at Goldsmiths College, London. Her first poetry collection was Kingdomland. She is the poetry editor of Granta magazine and Granta Books.

    Featured in

  • Helen Allison

    Helen Allison lives in Forres in the north of Scotland. Her work has been widely published online and her first full poetry collection Tree standing small was published by Clochoderick Press in 2018 . Her work reflects her interest in the natural world and in human relationships.

    Featured in

  • Deborah Alma

    Deborah Alma (otherwise known as the Emergency Poet) is a poet, editor and creative writing lecturer at Keele University. Her mission of bringing poetry to people who might not otherwise read it has led her to edit a number of popular anthologies, including Emergency Poet – An Anti-stress Poetry Anthology (Michael O’Mara, 2015).  Her own first full collection Dirty Laundry was published by Nine Arches Press in 2018.

    Featured in