CANDLESTICK PRESS LIMITED - Key Persons
Abeer Ameer grew up in Cardiff and trained as dentist before starting to write poetry. Her debut collection is Inhale/Exhale (Seren, 2021) in which she explores aspects of her Iraqi heritage. Her work has been widely published in journals and online.
Andre Bagoo is a Trinidadian poet and writer, the author of four books of poems including BURN (Shearsman, 2015) and Pitch Lake (Peepal Tree, 2017), as well as the essay collection The Undiscovered Country (Peepal Tree, 2020).
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.
Anna Barker is a poet, novelist and short story writer who largely takes inspiration from the natural world. Her first novel received a Betty Trask award from the Society of Authors. She teaches creative writing and academic writing to Masters and PhD students. Her debut poetry collection, Book of Crow, was published by Indigo Dreams in November 2023.
Anne Stevenson is an Anglo-American poet. She grew up and studied in America, but has since lived in Britain. Her several volumes of poetry include Stone Milk (2007). She lives in Durham and was awarded the Northern Rock Foundation Writers' Award in 2002.
Belinda Zhawi is a Zimbabwean-born writer and educator based in London. She is a former London Laureate and ICA Associate Poet whose work explores the effects of colonialism on southern Africa. Her pamphlet Small Inheritances was published by Ignition Press in 2019. She has run the London poetry platform Born::Free for five years.
Benjamin Zephaniah (1958 - 2023) was a poet, novelist and playwright who grew up in Jamaica and Birmingham. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Talking Turkeys (1994); Too Black, Too Strong (2001); and We Are Britain! (2002). He also wrote plays and teenage novels, and produced many music recordings.
Bill Adair is an award-winning singer-songwriter, based in Stirling, who performs at festivals and folk clubs throughout the UK and abroad. His CDs, Along the Miners' Rows and Dusty Boots on a Gravel Road, combine his own compositions with interpretations of traditional Scottish ballads and Delta Blues. His first collection of poetry, Learning to Fly, was published in 2017 and his most recent volume, New Testament Wives, appeared in 2019.
Ciaran Berry was born in Donegal, Ireland and now lives in the US. He has published three poetry collections including most recently Liner Notes (The Gallery Press, 2018). His style is often conversational, but he is able to vividly capture other lives, such as those of wild creatures.
Connie Bensley lives in London, where she worked as a secretary and medical copywriter. She writes plays, and is also known for her sharply humorous poems, collections of which include Private Pleasures (2007) and Finding a Leg to Stand On: New & Selected Poems 1980-2012 (Bloodaxe, 2012).
Dannie Abse (1923 - 2014) was born in Cardiff, Wales to a Jewish family. Although best known as a poet, Abse worked in medicine, and was a specialist at a chest clinic for over thirty years. In 2012 was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to poetry and literature.
David Belbin (b. 1958) was born in Sheffield but has lived in Nottingham since completing his degree at Nottingham University. He is a popular short story writer and the author of numerous novels for young adults. His short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies and many are published in Provenance: New and Collected Stories from Shoestring Press. David teaches creative writing at Nottingham Trent University.
David Wilson is a British poet and novelist living in North Yorkshire. He has climbed extensively in the UK, in the Alps and further afield. His debut poetry pamphlet Slope was published by SmithDoorstop in 2016 and The Equilibrium Line appeared in 2019.
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.
Candlestick Press is run by a small, dedicated team which is headed by publisher and editor Di Slaney. Di studied English and European Literature and is an established poet as well as having extensive commercial and marketing experience. In addition to running Candlestick, Di spends her time running Manor Farm Charitable Trust, a sanctuary for elderly and disabled livestock. Di loves everything to do with sheep, especially yarn, and has a passion that borders on obsession for crime fiction.
Dorothy Wordsworth (1771 - 1855) was the younger sister of the poet William Wordsworth. She enjoyed a close companionship with her brother, settling at Dove Cottage, Grasmere with him and his wife, Mary, and later moving to Rydal Mount. She wrote travel journals and poetry, and has become famous for her posthumously published Grasmere Journal, a fascinating account of daily life, excursions and conversations with literary figures of the time.
Elizabeth Bartlett (1924 - 2008) wrote eight poetry collections, including the acclaimed retrospective Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Two Women Dancing: New & Selected Poems (1995). She worked for a long time in the health service, as a doctor's receptionist, and for the Home Care Service, an environment which provided her with material for some of her most moving poems.
Ellen Bass is an American poet and non-fiction writer who now lives in California. She gained an MA in Poetry from Boston University where she studied with Anne Sexton. Her poetry collections include Mules of Love (BOA Editions Ltd., 2002) and Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches creative writing.
Emily Wills lives in Gloucestershire where she works as a GP. She won the Frogmore prize in 2012 and 2013. She is the author of two collections, Diverting the Sea (2000) and Developing the Negative (2008), and a pamphlet, Unmapped (2014), all published by The Rialto.
Fiona Benson is an English poet living in Devon whose first collection Bright Travellers (Cape, 2014) won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. Her second Vertigo & Ghost (Cape, 2019) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. She began writing as a child and rose to prominence as a Faber New Poet. Her work explores domesticity and women's experiences, as well as the beauty of the natural world.
Fleur Adcock was born in New Zealand. She is an award-winning poet, who has also written libretti and is a regular contributor to, and editor and translator of, poetry anthologies. She was awarded an OBE in 1996. Recent collections are Poems 1960-2000 (2000) and Glass Wings (2013), both published by Bloodaxe Books.
Gregory Woods was born in Cairo in 1953, moving to the south of England in 1961. Holding two doctorates, he was the first person in Britain to hold the post of Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies, which he was appointed to at Nottingham Trent University. He has published five poetry collections, all with Carcanet Press.
Hedd Wyn (1887 -1917) was a Welsh language poet who was posthumously awarded the bard's chair at the 1917 National Eisteddfod after being killed in World War I. Born Ellis Humphrey Evans, he was inspired to take the bardic name Hedd Wyn, meaning ‘Blessed Peace', from the way sunlight penetrated the mist in the Meirionydd valleys.
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.
Holly Yuille is a poet and fiction writer, who often uses magic realism in her work. As well as holding a Creative Writing Degree from Swansea University, Holly regularly performs at spoken word events in Worcester where she now lives. She was the winner of the 2019 Worcestershire Litfest Flash Fiction Slam.
Jackie Wills is a British poet who has published several collections. Powder Tower (Arc, 1995) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and her most recent Woman's Head As Jug is influenced by her collaboration with the visual artist Jane Fordham. She has held two residencies at the Royal Literary Fund and lives and works in Brighton.
James Berry (1924 - 2017) was a Jamaican poet who settled in Britain in the 1940s. His poetry is notable for using a mixture of standard English and Jamaican Patois. He was at the forefront of championing British/West Indian writing and published numerous poetry collections and books for children in his long life. Bloodaxe published his Selected Poems (A Story I Am In) in 2011.
James Womack is a writer and translator. He studied Russian, English and translation at university. His first poetry collection Misprint was published by Carcanet in 2012 and his collection On Trust: A Book of Lies in 2017. He teaches Spanish Literature and Translation at Cambridge University and has translated several books from Spanish and Russian.
James Wright (1927 - 1980) is widely considered to be one of the finest American poets of his generation, admired by both critics and fellow poets. He experimented with style and language but his themes - loneliness and alienation - remained the same. He published numerous collections, starting with The Green Wall (Yale University Press, 1957). Above the River: The Complete Poems was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux twelve years after his death.
Jean Atkin is an award-winning poet based in Shropshire. Her first collection, Not Lost Since Last Time, is published by Oversteps Books. She has also published five poetry pamphlets and a children's novel, The Crow House. She has held residencies and worked on projects, especially collaborative projects, in both Scotland and England.
Jo Bell is a poet, tutor and mentor. She was born in Sheffield and until 2015 was the first Canal Laureate, appointed by The Poetry Society and the Canal & River Trust. She has published several collections of poetry, including most recently Kith (Nine Arches Press, 2015).
John Agard is a Guyanese poet, author of several poetry collections for both adults and children, the latest being Clever Backbone (2009). He often writes in collaboration with his partner Grace Nichols, and lives in South East England. He has travelled throughout the world performing his poetry.
John Arlott (1914 - 1991) was a journalist, author and cricket commentator for BBC's Test Match Special. He was a popular authority on cricket, and known for his poetic phraseology when commentating. He was also a former police officer, wine connoisseur and poet, awarded an OBE in 1970.
John Ashbery (1927 - 2017) was one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, winning almost every one of the country's literary awards. His first collection was Some Trees (1957) which won a competition judged by WH Auden (later said that he hadn't understood any of the poems). Ashbery's later work was influenced by abstract expressionism and his experience as an art critic. He believed that poetry should reflect the fluidity and uncertainty of life.
John Betjeman (1906 - 1984) was a popular poet, writer and broadcaster, and passionate defender of Victorian architecture. His Collected Poems was published in 1958 and his verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells, in 1960. He was knighted in 1969, and became Poet Laureate in 1972.
John Woodall's poetry pamphlet This is Just to Say was published by Offa's Press in 2018. In 2022, he was the Wolverhampton Literature Festival Poetry Slam Champion.
Judith Wright (1915 - 2000) continues to be one of Australia's best-loved poets. She published more than 50 books and was an active environmentalist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights. She believed that the poet should be concerned with national and social problems. Her Collected Poems was published in 2017.
Kate Bass is a British poet who works as an illustrator. Her published collections include a pamphlet Onion House (Many Press, 1996) and a full collection The Pasta Maker (Smith Doorstop, 2003). Her poetry is infused with precise observations of everyday life and explores themes of family relationships and parenthood.
is a Modern Languages graduate and has worked as a journalist and in PR. She is also a published poet. She works alongside Di, providing editorial and marketing support. Kathy likes curlews, swimming in ponds, Eric Ravilious, and is very interested in the Oxford comma.
Kim Addonizio is an American writer and the author of seven poetry collections, two novels, two short story collections and two books on writing poetry. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a National Book Award Finalist for her collection Tell Me. Her latest books are Mortal Trash: Poems (W.W. Norton) and a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress (Penguin).
Kit Wright has written more than twenty-five books for adults and children. He is also the winner of awards such as the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award and (jointly) the Heinemann Award. He was educated at Oxford, and then worked as a lecturer in Canada before returning to England in 1970, where he has remained since.
Li Bai (701 - 762) also known as Li Po was a major Chinese poet. Along with his friend Du Fu he was the most prominent figure in the flourishing of poetry during the Tang Dynasty. His work was brought to prominence in the West by translations: Ezra Pound's Cathay (1915) and Amy Lowell's Fir-Flower Tablets (1921).
Liz Berry was born in the Black Country and now lives in Birmingham. Her work is recognisable for its distinctive usage of Black Country dialect and vocabulary. Her pamphlet, The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls, was published in 2010 and her debut collection, Black Country (2014), won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in 2014.
Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856 - 1935) was an American poet and teacher. Her writing career began with A Branch of May after which she went on to publish eight further collections. She also produced two memoirs and an autobiographical novel. In 1931 she became Poet Laureate of Maryland, the state where she lived for most of her life.
Job Titles:
- Artist and Textile Designer
Lizzie Adcock is an artist and textile designer based in Derbyshire. She creates pieces ranging from framed original artwork to textiles and screen- and block-printed fabrics. She also sculpts pewter buttons and decorations. Many of her designs are informed by her love of historical textiles.
Lotte Beatrix Crawford is an illustrator and printmaker. She is also an art historian and academic with an interest in early 20th century women textile artists. Books about Tirzah Garwood and Enid Marx are forthcoming.
Margaret Atwood is an internationally renowned writer from Canada, more famous for her many award-winning novels than for her poetry. Nevertheless, she has published eighteen collections, of which the first was Double Persephone. This was self-published in 1961 before any of her novels had appeared. She has won numerous international awards and is also a critic, teacher and environmental activist.
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.
Martin (Donisthorpe) Armstrong (1882 - 1974) was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and served in France in the First World War. He wrote in a variety of forms, in later years concentrating on fiction, but spent much of his early career writing poetry. He played a central role in the Georgian poetry movement in the 1920s.
Matthew Arnold (1822 - 1888) was a Victorian poet and social critic. After studying at Oxford he worked for many years as an inspector of schools. In 1857 he became Oxford Professor of Poetry and was the first in the role to give his lectures in English rather than Latin. One of his most famous poems is ‘The Scholar Gypsy' which laments what he calls "the disease" of modern life.
Mike Barlow is a poet and artist. His first poetry collection Living the Difference was published by Salt in 2004. He has gone on to publish several pamphlets and to be successful in a number of major competitions. In fact, his poem ‘The Third Wife' was the winner of the National Poetry Competition in 2006. His latest title is Charmed Lives (Smith/Doorstop, 2012).
Mona Arshi is a poet and poetry tutor and worked as a human rights lawyer before she started writing poetry. In 2011 she completed an MA in Poetry at the University of East Anglia, after which her debut collection Small Hands (Pavilion, 2015) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Dear Big Gods was published in 2019 by University of Liverpool Press.
Moniza Alvi was born in Pakistan and grew up in England. She worked for some years as a secondary school teacher. Her poetry collections include Souls (2002), How the Stone Found Its Voice (2005) and Europa (2008), shortlisted for the 2008 TS Eliot Prize.
Neil Astley is editor of Bloodaxe Books, which he founded in 1978. His books include many anthologies, most notably the Bloodaxe Staying Alive trilogy, as well as two novels featuring sheep, The End of My Tether (Scribners), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, and The Sheep Who Changed the World (Flambard), about a cloned black sheep who defeats the forces of international terrorism.
Panya Banjoko is a writer, storyteller and performance poet who performed at the 2012 Olympics. Her first published work was ‘Brain Drain' published in IC3- An Anthology of New Black Writing In Britain (Penguin 2000). Her second, ‘Rasta in the Millennium' was published by the Millennium Commission. She also writes for children and her work has featured in numerous anthologies.
Paul Batchelor was born in Northumberland and is a poet and critic. His first collection of poems, The Sinking Road, was published by Bloodaxe in 2008. He has won the Times Stephen Spender Prize for Translation and the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Prize, and he writes criticism for the Guardian and the TLS.
Paul Yandle is a poet and trainee English teacher from South Wales. He studied Creative and Professional Writing at the University of Glamorgan and graduated in 2005. His poems have been published in several literary anthologies and magazines, including Poetry Wales.
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.
Rob Barnes studied painting and printmaking at Hull College of Art and London University in the early 1960s. He taught etching, screen-printing, lino and related surface printmaking at Keswick Hall College in Norfolk before taking up a position at the University of East Anglia where he continued teaching in the School of Education until 2006. He now combines his work as an artist with playing the violin in various local orchestras.
Robert Wrigley is an American poet who has published numerous collections, including Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems (Penguin, 2013). His work often engages with rural Western landscapes, exploring how humans belong within the natural world. He cites Keats and Wallace Stevens as major influences on his own writing. He lives in Idaho.
Romalyn Ante is a Filipino-British writer, based in Wolverhampton. Her poetry publications include the pamphlet Rice & Rain (V Press, 2018) and the full collection Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto and Windus, 2020). Her work has been broadcast on BBC radio and published in magazines including Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. She also works full-time as a nurse practitioner.
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch has published three collections of poems, Rockclimbing in Silk (Seren, 2001), Not in These Shoes (Picador, 2008) and Banjo (Picador, 2012). Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, Poetry London, Poetry Wales and Poetry Review. In 2005 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and in 2007 a grant from the Society of Authors.
Sarah Young is a printmaker, designer, painter, maker and illustrator whose first creative venture was a travelling puppet theatre with her husband. She now works from her studio on the south coast of England and her work is widely exhibited in galleries across the UK and in the US. She has recently illustrated a collection of Greek Myths for children, published by Walker Books.
Sarah Ziman is a poet who was born and brought up in the South Wales valleys, and currently lives in Hertfordshire. She won the YorkMix Poems for Children Competition in 2021, and has had poems for young people published in anthologies and magazines worldwide. Her debut children's collection will be published in 2024, by Troika Books.
Simon Armitage is the current Poet Laureate and alongside numerous poetry collections he has written novels and works of non-fiction. His first poetry book Zoom was published by Bloodaxe in 1989 and since then he has gone on to publish more than fifteen collections. His work regularly features on the GCSE English syllabus and in 2015 he became Oxford Professor of Poetry. He is also Professor of Poetry at Sheffield University.
Sophia Argyris was born in Belgium to an English and Greek family. She grew up in Brussels until the age of nine, and then in the North of Scotland. She currently lives near Oxford, where she writes, and teaches yoga and meditation. Her work has been published widely in magazines and anthologies. Her short collection How Do the Parakeets Stay Green? won the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize and was published in 2014 by Indigo Dreams.
Job Titles:
- Illustrator of Mixed British
Sophie Bass is a London-based illustrator of mixed British and Trinidadian heritage. She creates vivid images which are inspired by her love of music, reflecting themes of social justice, mythology and symbolism.
Tamar Yoseloff was born in the US and moved to the UK in 1987. She has published six full collections, most recently The Black Place (Seren, 2019). She is also the author of Formerly (the inaugural chapbook from her publishing venture Hercules Editions). She is currently a lecturer on the Poetry School / Newcastle University MA in Writing Poetry and cites the visual arts as one of her key areas of interest.
Tara Bergin was born in Dublin and came to the UK to undertake academic research. Her first poetry collection This is Yarrow was published by Carcanet in 2013 and won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. She wrote her PhD on Ted Hughes and his translations of János Pilinszky and currently teaches Creative Writing at Newcastle University.
Tiffany Atkinson was born in Berlin and has lived in Wales since 1993. She lectures in English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. Her first collection was Kink and Particle (Seren 2006) and her third So Many Moving Parts (Bloodaxe 2014) won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2015.
Tiphanie Yanique was born in the Caribbean and now lives in New York. She writes fiction and poetry and her collection Wife won the Forward/Felix Dennis Prize in the UK for Best First Collection in 2016. She had started writing it in 2000. She has commented that poets use language and form ‘to find a way to say something anew.'
Valerie Bence's first pamphlet Falling in love with a dead man was published by Cinnamon Press (2019). The poems are sourced in Rembrandt artworks and he is with her every day, in the form of a tattoo. Overlap, her second pamphlet was published in 2022 by the Emma Press . She has been shortlisted for the Poetry School/Nine Arches Press Primers, Fish Poetry prize, longlisted for the Ginkgo Prize and had a poem in the inaugural issue of Eat the Storms in 2022. She is a Mum and Nonna and lives and works in Buckinghamshire.
Virginia Graham (1910 - 1993) was a writer of poetry, journalism and essays, best known for her 1946 poetry collection Consider the Years, about her life during the Second World War. She was the daughter of Harry Graham and a close friend of Joyce Grenfell, with whom she collaborated.
William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939) was an Irish poet and a major figure in twentieth-century poetry. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, the first Irishman so honoured. A driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, he, along with others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. Yeats was a very good friend of Indian Bengali poet Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.
William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) was born at Cockermouth in Cumbria and began publishing poetry in 1793. He collaborated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads, a book which marked the beginning of the Romantic Movement in English Poetry. He settled in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy and wife Mary, and his poems include the famous Daffodils and his long autobiographical poem, The Prelude, published after his death.