Pascale Petit is an award-winning poet with eight collections to her name. Born in Paris, Petit is of French, Welsh and Indian heritage, and grew up in Wales and France. She graduated from the Royal College of Art and spent the first part of her life as a sculptor before concentrating on poetry. Her writing draws very much from visual art, and this can be seen in her expressions of a mythic imagination as she writes the natural world. Her first collection, Heart of a Deer, was published in 1998, and was followed by The Zoo Father (2001) which earned her the first of four TS Eliot Prize nominations and a selection as a Next Generation poet. Her seventh collection, Mama Amazonica (2017), won the inaugural Laurel Prize (2020), and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize (2018), making it the first time this prize had been awarded to a work of poetry. Petit has also mentored many other poets through the Jerwood Compton Fellowship, The Complete Works, and Tate Modern. She was Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 1989 - 2005, and, along with Mimi Khalvati, is a co-founding tutor of The Poetry School.
