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Pascale Petit (poet)

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Pascale Petit
Pascale Petit
Pascale Petit
Born (1953-12-20) 20 December 1953 (age 71)
Paris, France
OccupationPoet
LanguageEnglish
NationalityFrench and British
Alma materRoyal College of Art
Period1994–present
Notable works
  • Mama Amazonica (2017)
Notable awards
  • RSL Ondaatje Prize, 2018
  • Laurel Prize for Poetry, 2020

Pascale Petit (born 20 December 1953),[1] is a French-born British poet of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. 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 and India.

Petit has published eight poetry collections, four of which were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her seventh collection Mama Amazonica won the Ondaatje Prize in 2018 and the inaugural Laurel Prize for Poetry in 2020.[2] In 2018, Petit was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[3]

Career

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Petit has published eight poetry collections: Heart of a Deer (1998), The Zoo Father (2001), The Huntress (2005), The Treekeeper's Tale (2008), What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo (2010), Fauverie (2014), Mama Amazonica (2017) and Tiger Girl (2020). She also published a pamphlet of poems The Wounded Deer: Fourteen Poems After Frida Kahlo (2005). For her work in poetry she has received many awards, including the Cholmondeley Award, four from Arts Council England and three from the Society of Authors.

Petit was shortlisted for the Forward Best Single Poem Prize after publishing "The Strait-Jackets" (from The Zoo Father) and in 2001 she was one of ten poets commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to write a poem for National Poetry Day. The Zoo Father (2001) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The Zoo Father (2001), The Huntress (2005), What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo (2010), and Fauverie (2014) 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.[clarification needed] What the Water Gave Me was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year.

Petit's 2017 collection, Mama Amazonica, won the inaugural Laurel Prize for Poetry 2020, the 2018 Ondaatje Prize, was a Poetry Book Society Choice, and was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize. Her 2020 collection Tiger Girl was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.

The Zoo Father is published in a bilingual edition in Mexico and distributed in Spain and Latin America. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Serbian, Spanish (in Mexico) and French. She has also translated the 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. The Poetry Book Society selected her as one of the 2004 Next Generation Poets, a promotional listing for spotlighting notable young to middle aged British poets. Petit became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

Reception

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The Australian poet Les Murray has praised her work in The 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."[4]

Awards, prizes and fellowships

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Bibliography

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Poetry collections

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  • Icefall Climbing pamphlet (Smith Doorstop, 1994)[a]
  • Heart of a Deer (Enitharmon, 1998)[b]
  • The Zoo Father (Seren, 2001)[c]
  • The Huntress (Seren, 2005)[d]
  • The Wounded Deer: Fourteen Poems After Frida Kahlo pamphlet (Smith Doorstop, 2005)[e]
  • The Treekeeper's Tale (Seren, 2008)[f]
  • What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo (Seren, UK, 2010, Black Lawrence Press, US, 2011)[g]
  • Fauverie (Seren, 2014)[h]
  • Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe, 2017)[i]
  • Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe, 2020)[j]

Poems

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Title Year First published Reprinted/collected
The Children's Asylum 2003 Petit, Pascale (July–August 2003). "The Children's Asylum". Quadrant. 47 (7–8 [398]): 76.
The feast 2003 Petit, Pascale (July–August 2003). "The feast". Quadrant. 47 (7–8 [398]): 77.
Portrait of my mother as Xipe Totec 2003 Petit, Pascale (July–August 2003). "Portrait of my mother as Xipe Totec". Quadrant. 47 (7–8 [398]): 76.

Edited works

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  • Tying the Song Co-editor with Mimi Khalvati (Enitharmon, 2000)[k]
  • Poetry from Art at Tate Modern editor, pamphlet (Tate Publications, 2010)[l]

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Bibliography notes
  1. ^ Petit, Pascale (1994). Icefall climbing. Huddersfield: Smith/Doorstep. ISBN 9781869961619. OCLC 32509795.
  2. ^ Petit, Pascale (1998). Heart Of a Deer. London: Enitharmon. ISBN 9781900564168. OCLC 1167596628.
  3. ^ Petit, Pascale (2001). The zoo father. Bridgend: Seren. ISBN 9781854113054. OCLC 1170500661.
  4. ^ Petit, Pascale (2005). The huntress. Bridgend: Seren. ISBN 9781854113962. OCLC 1170001478.
  5. ^ Petit, Pascale (2005). The wounded deer: fourteen poems after Frida Kahlo. Huddersfield: Smith/Doorstop Books. ISBN 9781902382753. OCLC 1172120161.
  6. ^ Petit, Pascale (2008). The treekeeper's tale. Bridgend: Seren. ISBN 9781854114716. OCLC 213113734.
  7. ^ Petit, Pascale (2013). What the Water Gave Me. New York: Seren. ISBN 9781781720073. OCLC 1058276544.
  8. ^ Petit, Pascale (2014). Fauverie. Seren. ISBN 9781781721681. OCLC 1023220332.
  9. ^ Petit, Pascale (2017). Mama Amazonica. Bloodaxe Books, Ltd. OCLC 1027577069.
  10. ^ Petit, Pascale (2020). Tiger girl. ISBN 9781780375267. OCLC 1111792293.
  11. ^ Khalvati, Mimi; Petit, Pascale; Poetry School (London, England) (2000). Tying the song: a first anthology from the Poetry School, 1997-2000. London; Chester Springs, PA: Enitharmon Press; Distributed in the USA and Canada by Dufour Editions. ISBN 9781900564762. OCLC 44152912.
  12. ^ Petit, Pascale; Tate Modern (Gallery) (2010). Poetry from art: at Tate Modern. OCLC 903084777.

Critical studies and reviews of Petit's work

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Mama Amazonica

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References

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  1. ^ "Pascale Petit". lidiavianu.scriptmania.com. Retrieved 24 June 2021.
  2. ^ "Petit takes inaugural Laurel Prize for Mama Amazonica | The Bookseller". www.thebookseller.com. Retrieved 24 June 2021.
  3. ^ "Pascale Petit". Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 24 June 2021.
  4. ^ Padel, Ruth (11 June 2010). "What the Water Gave Me by Pascale Petit". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 26 November 2024.
  5. ^ "Winners | Manchester Poetry Prize | Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU)". Archived from the original on 9 March 2017. Retrieved 8 March 2017.
  6. ^ "Past winners of the Cholmondeley Awards". Society of Authors. Accessed 15 March 2018.
  7. ^ "Keats-Shelley Prize 2020". keats-shelley.org. Retrieved 6 June 2021.
  8. ^ "2020 Winners". Laurel Prize for Poetry in Association with Poetry School. Retrieved 9 April 2021.
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