www.pascalepetit.co.uk

    
photo credit Jemimah Kuhfeld                           photo credit Jemimah Kuhfeld                        photo credit Derek Adams

   
photo credit Kitty Sullivan                               photo credit Kitty Sullivan                            photo credit Dafna Kaplan

Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in London. She has published five poetry collections. Her latest is What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo, published by Seren in May 2010. Two of her previous books, The Zoo Father (Seren, 2001) and The Huntress (Seren, 2005), were both shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and were both Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement. 

In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected her as one of twenty Next Generation Poets. She has received three major awards from Arts Council England. The Zoo Father was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and also a Book of the Year in The Independent. It won an Arts Council of England Writers’ Award, a New London Writers’ Award and a poem from the book, 'The Strait-Jackets', was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. A Spanish/English edition is published in Mexico and Spain. A prizewinning pamphlet The Wounded Deer – Fourteen poems after Frida Kahlo (Smith Doorstop) appeared in 2005. Her debut collection, Heart of a Deer, was published by Enitharmon in 1998.

She has co-edited Tying the Song (Enitharmon, 2000) the first anthology from The Poetry School,  and guest edited the magazine Pratik – Contemporary British Poetry Issue (Nirala Editions, Kathmandu, 2007). Her poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and published widely in journals around the world, as well as in the UK, the US, and Australia; including Poetry Review, American Poetry Review and Quadrant. They have been translated into Russian, Nepalese, Uzbek, Hebrew, Bulgarian, Polish, Chinese, Lithuanian, Spanish, Farsi, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Dutch and Romanian.

She was Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 1989 to 2005, and was a co-founding tutor of The Poetry School. In 2004 she was selected as one of the ten best new women poets of the decade by Mslexia magazine. She teaches poetry courses in the galleries at Tate Modern, and tutors for the Arvon Foundation, Taliesin Trust and The Poetry School.

Pascale has translated poems by Yang Lian, Zhai Yongming, Wang Xiaoni, Xi Chuan, Zhou Zan and Amir Or. She is widely travelled in the Venezuelan Amazon, China, Kazakhstan, Nepal, and Mexico. She has given readings nationally and internationally, including at Letras en el Golfo – Tampico International Literature Festival in Mexico, Yellow Mountain Festival in China, Sha'ar Poetry Festival in Israel, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Kathmandu, the US, and at numerous UK venues including Tate Modern, the Purcell Room, the British Museum, Ways With Words, Aldeburgh, Ledbury, StAnza and Hay festivals. In 2007 she won an Arts Council Award to travel to Nepal and in 2008 she took part in the British Council's New Silk Road project in Almaty. 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 groundbreaking touring exhibition Pandora's Box in 1984-5.