Welcome
to the website of poet Pascale Petit.
Pascale’s eighth collection, Tiger Girl, published by Bloodaxe in 2020, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and for Wales Book of the Year. Her seventh collection Mama Amazonica, published by Bloodaxe in 2017, won the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020, the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize 2018 and was the Poetry Book Society Choice. Four of Pascale’s earlier collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Salt will publish her debut novel My Hummingbird Father in 2024.
‘I think this might be her best book so far because of this complexity of a family in crisis against a planet in crisis – she’s very much a poet of the environment… She has a powerful, imagistic authority over the landscape. It’s a very moving, powerful book.’ – Daljit Nagra, reviewing Tiger Girl on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row
‘Petit is a passionate laureate of the natural world, but alive to the cruelty of human depredation…’ – Aingeal Clare, The Guardian
‘Beautifully sad, the imagery inexhaustible, the sorrow and torment both tempered and sharpened by the relish for language and the ingenuity of the imagination.’ – Simon Armitage on Mama Amazonica
‘Mama Amazonica stitches parallels between the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and a mother and daughter’s experience of mental illness. We felt that in creating this duality she might have achieved what should have been impossible.” – Moniza Alvi, Judge, The Laurel Prize