Pascale Petit

Pascale Petit’s seventh collection, Mama Amazonica, is longlisted for the inaugural Laurel Prize. Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s new award that recognises and encourages the resurgence of nature and environmental writing currently taking place in poetry. More information HERE and HERE

Tiger Girl is shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection
Pascale Petit‘s eighth collection Tiger Girl, forthcoming from Bloodaxe on 3 September, has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. The five-strong shortlist for the £10,000 prize was announced on 10 June. The winners of all three categories in the 2020 Forward Prizes for Poetry will be revealed on 25 October 2020.
The judges were Leaf Arbuthnot, Kim Moore, Alexandra Harris, Roger Robinson and David Wheatley.  More details HERE

Pascale Petit won the 2020 Keats-Shelley poetry prize with her poem ‘Indian Paradise Flycatcher’, which will be published in her collection Tiger Girl in September 2020.
Read more HERE

Free Thinking, BBC Radio 3, Wednesday 1 May 2019, 10pm
Pascale Petit and three other winners of the RSL Ondaatje Prize took part in a special event at the British Library on 16 April 2019 to celebrate 15 years of the Prize. This event was recorded for BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking, and was broadcast on Wednesday 1 May. Pascale talked about how the Amazon rainforest inspired the collection, and read her poem ‘Jaguar Mama’ from Mama Amazonica.
Listen here.  Also downloadable as a BBC Arts & Ideas podcast.

Pascale Petit was on Radio 3’s The Verb 10pm Friday 19th October 2018
discussing ‘Forests and Metaphor’ and reading from her Ondaatje prizewinning collection Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe, 2017)

Pascale Petit’s Mama Amazonica has won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018
Pascale Petit’s seventh poetry collection Mama Amazonica has won the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, announced on 14 May 2018 at the Travellers Club, London.  The prize is an annual award of £10,000 for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, best evoking the spirit of a place.

‘Rich with metaphor, the poems explode on the page with the multiple narratives of motherhood, illness, pain, and redemption. All of this set in a rainforest that is both mythic and vividly alive. This is a book that feels almost magical in its unlikeliness, and that for me is what made it a clear winner,’- Tahmima Anam, on behalf of the judges Daljit Nagra, Eva Hoffman, Tahmima Anam.

Pascale Petit’s Mama Amazonica is shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018
The prize is valued at £5,000 and the winner will be announced in May

Pascale Petit is a RSL Literature Matters Awards winner
On 30 November 2018 the Royal Society of Literature awarded her a grant to write the first half of her eighth collection Tiger Girl, a sequence of poems exploring foreignness, in the context of Brexit Britain and her grandmother’s Indian heritage. One of the judges, Imtiaz Dharker, said that ‘a new collection of poems by Pascale Petit is always something to celebrate. To each one she brings images worked in the round, electrified by language to be live and sensuous’.

Mama Amazonica is the Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2017

Pascale Petit is a judge for the 2017 National Poetry Competition with Andrew McMillan and Hannah Lowe

Pascale Petit is on the judging panel for the 2017 Manchester Poetry Prize
for Manchester Metropolitan University, with Adam O’Riordan (chair) and Mona Arshi
who will award £10,000 to the winner for a small portfolio of poems, enter HERE

Pascale Petit is the poetry mentor for the Jerwood/Arvon Mentoring Programme 2017/18, and will mentor four poets for one year, they are: Romalyn Ante, Yvonne Reddick, Alice Hiller and Seraphima Kennedy. More information HERE

Arts Council England has awarded Pascale Petit a Grant from the Arts to finish her seventh collection Mama Amazonica, due from Bloodaxe in September 2017. The grant is to buy writing time and for a research trip in the Peruvian Amazon

Pascale Petit was Chair of the judging panel for the 2015 T S Eliot Prize
alongside poets Kei Miller and Ahren Warner

The Society of Authors awarded Pascale Petit a 2015 Cholmondeley Award, on 25 June 2015

Pascale Petit has a feature Omphalos in the Spring 2015 The Poetry Review
An occasional series in which poets write about a place central to their imaginative world

Fauverie was shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize. Pascale Petit read for the T.S. Eliot Prize Readings at the Royal Festival Hall, London on 11 January 2015 – Here’s Pascale’s reading:

‘My Father’s Wardrobe’ a poem from Fauverie is The Saturday Poem in the Guardian, Saturday 18 October 2014

‘Caracal’ a poem from Fauverie is Carol Rumens’ Poem of the Week in the Guardian, Monday 29 September 2014