Pascale Petit

Pascale Petit is a British-French poet born in Paris in 1953. She studied sculpture at the Royal College of Art and trained as a visual artist before becoming a poet. Her collections include Heart of a Deer (1998), The Zoo Father (2001), The Huntress (2005), What the Water Gave Me (2010), Fauverie (2014), and Mama Amazonica (2017). Mama Amazonica (2017, Bloodaxe Books) is her seventh collection, responding to the experience of her mentally ill and abusive mother through the lens of Amazonian wildlife and shamanism, deploying animals, birds, and tropical vegetation as figures for damage, survival, and love. The collection won the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. Petit's poetry is known for its deployment of natural history and ecology — particularly the Amazon rainforest — as a register for human emotional experience. She lives in Cornwall and has twice been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award.