Pascale Petit, is a French-born British poet. She was born in Paris and grew up in France and Wales. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and was a visual artist for the first part of her life. She has travelled widely, particularly in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon. She has published seven poetry collections: Heart of a Deer, The Zoo Father, The Huntress, The Treekeeper's Tale, What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, Fauverie and Mama Amazonica. She also published a pamphlet of poems The Wounded Deer: Fourteen Poems after Frida Kahlo. Four of her collections were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and her seventh, Mama Amazonica, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize. In 2018 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Background
Petit's 2017 collection Mama Amazonica won the 2018 RSL Ondaatje Prize, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize. The Zoo Father was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Fauverie, What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, The Huntress and The Zoo Father were all shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Three books were books of the year in The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement and The Independent. What the Water Gave Me was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year. Petit has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize and in 2001 she was one of ten poets commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to write a poem for National Poetry Day. In 2004, she was selected by the Poetry Book Society as one of the Next Generation Poets. The Zoo Father is published in a bilingual edition in Mexico and distributed in Spain and Latin America. She has received many awards, including the Cholmondeley Award, four from Arts Council England and three from the Society of Authors. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Serbian, Spanish and French. She has translated poems of a number of contemporary Chinese poets including Yang Lian, Wang Xiaoni and Zhai Yongming. She was Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 1990 to 2005, a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Middlesex University from 2007 to 2009 and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2011–12. She tutored poetry courses for Tate Modern for nine years, and currently tutors for the Arvon Foundation, The Poetry School and Literature Wales. In 2018 Petit became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Australian poet Les Murray has praised her work inThe Times Literary Supplement, where he wrote: "No other British poet I am aware of can match the powerful mythic imagination of Pascale Petit." Jackie Kay in The Observer wrote: "Pascale's poems are as fresh as paint, and make you look all over again at Frida and her brilliant and tragic life." Ruth Padel, reviewing What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo in The Guardian wrote: "Petit's collection is not a verse biography, but a hard-hitting, palette-knife evocation of the effect that bus crash had on Kahlo's life and work. 'And this is how I started painting. / Time stretched out its spectrum / and screeched its brakes.' WH Auden, in his elegy for Yeats, tells the Irish poet: 'Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.' Petit's collection, exploring the way trauma hurts an artist into creation, celebrates the rebarbative energy with which Kahlo redeemed pain and transformed it into paint."
