Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French, Welsh, and Indian heritage. Her ninth collection, Beast, is published by Bloodaxe in 2025, it won an Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors while in progress. Her eighth collection, Tiger Girl (2020), won an RSL Literature Matters Award and a poem from the book won the 2020 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. Tiger Girl was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection and for Wales Book of the Year 2021. Her seventh collection Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe, 2017), a Poetry Book Society Choice, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018, the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020, and was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018.
Her novel My Hummingbird Father was published by Salt in 2024.
Petit has published six earlier poetry collections, four of which were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, most recently, her sixth collection, Fauverie (Seren, 2014). A portfolio of poems from that book won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. In 2018 she was appointed as Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2015, and was the chair of the judges for the 2015 TS Eliot Prize. Her books have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Serbian and French. She is widely travelled in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon, China, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Mexico and India.
Her fifth collection, What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, published by Seren in 2010, was shortlisted for both the TS Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year. Two of her previous books, The Zoo Father and The Huntress, were also shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected Petit as one of the Next Generation Poets. The Zoo Father was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. A poem from the book, ‘The Strait-Jackets’, was shortlisted for a Forward Prize.
She was Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 1989 to 2005 and was a co-founding tutor of The Poetry School. Her poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, The Poetry Archive and ABC Radio National, and published widely in journals around the world, including in Poetry, The Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and Granta. She taught popular poetry courses in the galleries at Tate Modern for nine years, and currently tutors for the Arvon Foundation and Tŷ Newydd. She was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art 2011-12.
Petit has translated poems by Chinese poets including Yang Lian, Zhai Yongming and Wang Xiaoni. She has given readings nationally and internationally, including at Tampico International Literature Festival in Mexico, Yellow Mountain Festival in China, Sha’ar Poetry Festival in Israel, Estonia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Kathmandu, Belgrade and America. She spent the first part of her life as a sculptor and trained at the Royal College of Art. As an artist she held numerous exhibitions, including on London Underground, in the Natural History Museum, London, Arnolfini Bristol, Ferenz Gallery Hull, and participated in the feminist touring exhibition Pandora’s Box in 1984–85.
More author portraits
credit Derrick Kakembo for all portraits (contact Pascale for larger sizes)
