Pascale Petit’s debut novel My Hummingbird Father reviewed in The Guardian
on Thursday 24 October 2024 & in Guardian Saturday 26 October 2024
To read the review by Sana Goyal please click HERE
‘In this haunting and hypnotic first novel from the award-winning poet, life imitates art and art imitates life…Written in four parts and short chapters, My Hummingbird Father disentangles the relationship between art and abuse, and is shot through with epistolary elements and diary-like entries. Dominique is determined to “paint what hurts until it’s better. She can change the past with art. What would she do without art?” The novel is a redemption song and an ode to the lost innocence of childhood. Petit’s writing is as vivid as Dominique’s brushstrokes: here, there’s a forest full of fluttering, buzzing, rustling; there, Paris’s rues and boulevards, gargoyles and church bells. The author peels back layers and layers, only to reveal more secrets, losses, traumas.’ – Sana Goyal, The Guardian, 24 October 2024
Pascale Petit’s debut novel My Hummingbird Father to be published by Salt September 2024
Click here for more information
A photographic portrait of Pascale Petit is included in the Museum of Colour My Words exhibition. This exhibition documents 40 British poets of colour (1766-2016). Portrait © Derrick T Kakembo.
To visit the online exhibition click HERE
Two poems by Pascale Petit were included in the exhibition It’s Only The End of The World held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, 16-20 May 2022, during the first International UN Network on Migration Forum. The exhibition pairs each imagined future with a poem from artists, whose works celebrate the beauty of our natural world, mourn its destruction and call out for urgent action. You can also visit a virtual exhibition of the still pictures here: https://migrationnetwork.un.org/Exhibition2022
Pascale’s poems ‘Green Bee-eater’ from Tiger Girl and ‘Rainforest in the Sleep Room’ from Mama Amazonica were featured in videos for the virtual exhibition, with the poems read by Pascale herself.
‘Her Glasses’, a poem from Pascale Petit’s eighth collection Tiger Girl, is displayed on London Undergound for July 2021, more details HERE
Pascale Petit’s eighth collection Tiger Girl is shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year in the poetry category, more details HERE
Pascale Petit is a judge for the 2021 Forward Prizes for Poetry, along with Leontia Flynn, Shivanee Ramlochan, Tristram Fane Saunders and Chair, James Naughtie
Click HERE for more details on the Forward website
The Verb: Green Memoir, BBC Radio 3, Friday 13 November 2020, 10pm
Pascale Petit was a guest on Radio 3’s The Verb on 13 November.
Pascale read ‘Her Tigress Eyes’ and ‘Green Bee-eater’ from her eighth collection Tiger Girl and ‘Kapok’ from her seventh collection Mama Amazonica.
Listen here.
Pascale Petit’s seventh collection, Mama Amazonica, has won 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 was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection
Pascale Petit‘s eighth collection Tiger Girl, (Bloodaxe, 2020) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. 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 is now published in her collection Tiger Girl.
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 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 was Chair of the judging panel for the 2015 T S Eliot Prize
alongside poets Kei Miller and Ahren Warner
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:
