About the Author

Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in London. She has published six collections. Five poems from her latest book Fauverie won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. Her fifth collection, What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, was shortlisted for both the TS Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year. This book has gone into a number of reprintings and was Jackie Kay's Book of the Year in the Observer. Black Lawrence Press published a US edition in 2011. Three of Pascale's collections have been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and were also Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement, Observer and the Independent. Her second collection The Zoo Father was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was published in Mexico in a bilingual edition. A poem from it was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. Her selected poems are published in China. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected Petit as one of the Next Generation Poets. She has won numerous awards, including five from Arts Council England, and regularly appears in major festivals. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and was a visual artist for the first part of her life. She is widely travelled, including in the Venezuelan Amazon, China and Nepal. She has worked as Poetry Editor for Poetry London and currently tutors popular poetry courses at Tate Modern and for The Poetry School.

Reviews

"No other British poet I am aware of can match the powerful mythic imagination of Pascale Petit." Les Murray, Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year "Pascale Petit creates forms and strategies that go beyond common knowledge of what a poem can or should do; her poetry never behaves itself or betrays itself; and contemporary British poetry is all the livelier for it." David Morley, Magma "Our winner was chosen because of the un-reproducible bite of the images, her brilliant understanding of human psycho-drama, the sustained accomplishment of her metaphorical imagination." Adam O'Riordan, Chair of judges, Manchester Poetry Prize (for What The Water Gave Me, Poems after Frida Kahlo) 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. - Ruth Padel, The Guardian. (for poems from The Zoo Father) Petit carefully joins stories of such 'private wars' together with mythologies and histories of ancient cultures into a thick poetic weft. Her second collection, The Zoo Father (2001) catapults the reader into an imaginary and emotional jungle, where the relationship between a dying father and the daughter he has abused is fought out. Spun around the imagery of the Amazon and the ancient mythologies of indigenous peoples, these poems anchor 'private wars' in a historical domain, equally spanning the personal and universal. (Poetry International- Rotterdam)