Pascale Petit Readings & Workshops
'Tiger Girl... pushes deep into the wilder places of the forest and the human heart. It shimmers with the colours of bee-eaters and flycatchers and rages at the darker regions of environmental expoloitation and cruelty... Pascale Petit, shortlisted for the alarming, mythic, beautiful Tiger Girl.' - Alexandra Harris, Chair of Judges, Forward Prize for Best Collection
Pascale Petit's ninth poetry collection, Beast, is published by Bloodaxe in April 2025. She has published six previous poetry collections, four of which were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, most recently, her sixth collection, Fauverie (Seren, 2014). In 2018 she was appointed as Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2015, and was the chair of the judges for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize. Her novel Hummingbird Father was published by Salt in 2024.
Pascale Petit's eighth collection Tiger Girl, published by Bloodaxe in 2020, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and the English language poetry category of Wales Book of the Year 2021. Her seventh poetry collection Mama Amazonica, awarded Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2017 and shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018 - the first time in the prize's 15-year history that a poetry title won the award. It also won the inaugural Laurel Prize, UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage's new award for eco and environmental poetry. Pascale presented her Laurel Prize commission; 'Beast of Bodmin Moor' at Cornwall AONB on 22 September 2021.
Pascale Petit was interviewed on Radio 3's The Verb on Friday 13 November 2020. Listen here. She read poems from both Tiger Girl and Mama Amazonica at various points in the programme. Pascale gave a number of online readings and 'in conversation' events in autumn 2020, including at her Bloodaxe launch event in September (see videos below).
Hear Pascale read three poems from Tiger Girl on the iamb poets website here.
'Surprised!' from Tiger Girl is featured in the Spring 2021 issue of Oxford Review of Books. The collection was reviewed in great depth in their autumn 2020 issue here.
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
Saturday 30 November 2024, 3pm
Building Solidarity Through Poetry
Southwark Cathedral, London Bridge London SE1 9DA
Pascale Petit joins her fellow judges of the Togetherness Poetry Challenge, along with the winners, to close the Challenge in an amazing location, with spoken word performances and special guests.
More details and booking here.
Monday 10 February 2025, 7.30pm
Headline Reading for Café Writers (on Zoom)
Pascale will read from her debut novel My Hummingbird Father (Salt, 2024) and forthcoming ninth poetry collection, Beast (Bloodaxe, April 2025).
More details here - booking opens soon.
PAST EVENTS
FILM FOR COP26, NOVEMBER 2021
Pascale Petit reads two poems for SHE Changes Climate at COP26
Pascale Petit reads ‘Rainforest in the Sleep Room’ from Mama Amazonica and ‘Green Bee-eater’ from Tiger Girl. Film by Brian Fraser and edited by Kit Ondaatje Rolls for a COP26 event at The Pipe Factory, Glasgow, on 9 November 2021. Photographs and videos of the Peruvian Amazon and the green bee-eater in Bandhavgarh National Park, India, by Brian Fraser and Pascale Petit. With kind permission of Kit Ondaatje Rolls.
Launch Reading by Pascale Petit, Wayne Holloway-Smith & Phoebe Stuckes, 7-8 pm BST, Tuesday 8 September 2020
Bloodaxe Books online launch by Pascale Petit, Wayne-Holloway Smith and Phoebe Stuckes of their new poetry collections. The event was live-streamed on 8 September, and is now on YouTube. Hosted by editor Neil Astley.
The three readings were followed by a Q&A session with the online audience. Pascale was the first to read.
Pascale Petit launched her new collection Tiger Girl in a Bloodaxe online launch reading shared with Wayne Holloway-Smith and Phoebe Stuckes on 8 September 2020. This video is an excerpt from that event which went out on YouTube Live.
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Aingeal Clare reviewed Tiger Girl in The Guardian of 12 September 2020 here.
Tiger Girl was reviewed by Daljit Nagra on Radio 4's Front Row on 24 August 2020. Listen here. Daljit begins his poetry round-up at 21.48. He reviews Tiger Girl from 26.39.
An interview with Pascale Petit, focusing on Tiger Girl in particular, went online at Versopolis on 27 July 2020. Read here.
Two poems from Tiger Girl are featured on Extinction Rebellion's Writers' Rebel website are here. Pascale introduces the poems with the comment:
‘#ExtinctionRebellion’ and ‘For a Coming Extinction’ will both appear in my eighth collection, Tiger Girl, published by Bloodaxe in September 2020. Tiger Girl explores my grandmother’s Indian heritage and the fauna and flora of subcontinental jungles. Tiger girl is my grandmother, who brought me up with tales of wild tigers, but she’s also the endangered predators I encountered in Central India, with their threats of poaching, species extinction, and deforestation. In this overpopulated country, so many charismatic megafauna, such as tigers, leopards, elephants and sloth bears, have to inhabit smaller and smaller territories, next to displaced and impoverished forest tribals and local farmers. National parks and tiger reserves like Bandhavgarh in Madhya Pradesh, where I spent most of my time, are like a crucible, where humanity and wildlife struggle for survival.'
Pascale Petit's poem 'The Anthropocene' from Tiger Girl is featured in the New Statesman of 3 June here.
Some poems from Tiger Girl are featured on Pascale's blog here, along with photographs taken in India.
Pascale Petit's poem 'Indian Paradise Flycatcher' from Tiger Girl won the Keats-Shelley Prize. More details on our website here.
[14 July 2020]
