Pascale Petit Launch Readings
‘A kaleidoscopic menagerie of creatures, both heavenly and demonic, await the reader in Pascale Petit’s astonishing collection Beast.’ – Georgie Henley, Poetry Wales
Pascale Petit's ninth poetry collection, Beast, was published by Bloodaxe in April 2025. It is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2025.
In this new collection, mythic and familial beasts roam wild landscapes. These spirits haunt forests in India and the Amazon as well as the Camargue and Languedoc in France, as well as Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. Some of these remote places are vestiges of earth’s pristine habitats, while other wildernesses are encaged in cellars of Paris, along with the world’s last species. Beast asks if survival is possible in an abusive family and on an abused home planet, in the face of climate catastrophe, childhood trauma and war. These poems face difficult challenges and insist that making art is an act of love and hope, and there are joyful lyrics celebrating the ineffable beauty of endangered species.
Her 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, 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, 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. 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.
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‘A kaleidoscopic menagerie of creatures, both heavenly and demonic, await the reader in Pascale Petit’s astonishing collection Beast. [...] This is a collection of many skins, pelts, furs, wings, as Petit finds strange sanctuary in the quotidian violence of the skies and sea. Bodies are pierced, bruised, bloodied, yet it is Petit’s plaintive assertions of hope that truly knock the breath out of her reader, ‘I am a door no one can open’.' – Georgie Henley, Poetry Wales
'Petit, who is of French, Welsh, and Indian heritage, embraces the landscapes of each of her countries of origin in potent brooding poems that explore trauma and transformation. Following the dark paths her memories forge, Petit documents scenes that seethe with life and startling imagery, “the air quivering with scented paths into the perfumed forest.” [...] It’s a vivid and elegant collection.' – Publishers Weekly, on Beast
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781780377377
‘In this, her ninth collection, Pascale Petit summons a vivid bestiary of creatures – tigers, wolves, horses, dragons – across mythic and endangered landscapes: the Camargue of Provence, the tiger forests of India, the wilder edges of Cornwall. These animals are more than metaphor – they snarl, shimmer, and sob, taking on life and becoming, as we progress, fragments of memory or mirrors, watchers or helpers who “shield”. […] Family and the feral entwine, and trauma is not evaded but embraced, examined, and often transformed into dreamlike – nightmarish – yet also lyric imagery, via language that is lush but never overgrown. Rather, Petit’s lines are muscular, sensuous, and charged with feeling. There are moments of delicacy, but most palpably there is the song of survival… […] A remarkable work.’ – Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
https://www.buzzmag.co.uk/new-poetry-may-2025-emily-jungmin-yoon-pascale-petit/
‘These poems gallop with surrealism – each page is like stepping into a Frida Kahlo painting, or perhaps a work by Louise Bourgeois. […] Petit’s beasts dance through her language. […] For Petit, metaphors give form to the unspeakable. […] Although there may not be answers, there is powerful knowing here.’ – Ellora Sutton, Mslexia, on Beast
An in-depth video interview with Pascale Petit features in Wasafiri's subVERSEive: Conversations with Poets series of 26 May 2025. Watch on YouTube here. Scroll down for more details.
FORTHCOMING LAUNCH READINGS FOR BEAST
Friday 13 June 2025, 8pm
Launch of Beast at Ware Poets
Southern Maltings Arts Centre, Kibes Lane, Ware, Herfordshire, SG12 7BS
Pascale Petit will be reading from Beast at the monthly Ware Poets event.
More details and booking here.
Red Door Poets, Covent Garden, London, Tuesday 17 June 2025, 7pm
Venue: Club for Acts and Actors, 20 Bedford St, Covent Garden, London WC2E 9HP
Summer Party with Special Guests
Pascale Petit’s London launch of Beast, at a reading with Richard Scott and Katrina Naomi.
Free event, but booking required.
Booking via eventbrite here.
Heligan Homecoming Festival, Cornwall, Saturday 21 June 2025, 6pm
Pentewan, St Austell, Cornwall PL26 6EN
Simon Armitage and Pascale Petit reading at The Lost Gardens of Heligan
More information and booking here: https://www.heliganhomecoming.co.uk/sat-21st
Friday 27 June, 8pm
Ledbury Poetry Festival: Beast
Pascale Petit will be opening the 2025 Ledbury Poetry Festival with a reading from her new collection Beast.
Tickets £20. Book online here.
Wednesday 2 July 2025, 7.15pm
How I Write: Pascale Petit (Arvon at Home)
- in conversation with Daniel Sluman
Join Daniel Sluman online as he interviews award-winning poet and novelist Pascale Petit, as part of his 2025 virtual residency with Arvon. Daniel will be asking Pascale about her creative process, her influences, and how she has approached her writing at different stages throughout her long career.
More details and booking here.
The Lyric Self, Arvon course at Totleigh Barton, Devon, Mon 14– Sat 19 July 2025
What are the ways into writing the personal in poetry? How can you make it intimate, playful and inventive for the writer and reader? Intrepid poets Pascale Petit and Will Harris, both with award-winning collections investigating the lyric self, will guide you on this residential course. Guest reader is Ella Frears.
Details here. FULLY BOOKED!
North Cornwall Book Festival Saturday/Sunday 27/28 September 2025
ST Endellion, Port Isaac, Cornwall PL29 3TP
Katrina Naomi and Pascale Petit reading. Pascale will read from her new poetry collection, Beast, and her debut novel My Hummingbird Father.
Details to be announced in May here.
PAST EVENTS
Wasafiri, sub(VERSE)ive: In Conversation with Pascale Petit, 26 May 2025
A fifty-minute video interview with Pascale Petit about her ninth collection Beast features in Wasafiri Magazine’s sub(VERSE)ive series of conversations with contemporary poets who are releasing new collections in 2025, exploring their practices and creative processes. Hosted by Prerana Kumar, whose close reading of the book and insightful questions made this an especially interesting discussion. The interview ended with Pascale reading ‘The River’, the opening poem from Beast (from 49:02).
ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT FOR BEAST
Bloodaxe online launch reading with Pascale Petit, Vidyan Ravinthiran and Dis Poetry by Benjamin Zephaniah - Tuesday 22 April 2025, 7pm BST
Pascale Petit and Vidyan Ravinthiran celebrated the publication of their latest collections by reading live and discussing their books as well as Benjamin Zephaniah’s posthumous retrospective Dis Poetry: Selected Poems & Lyrics with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. The event includes clips of Benjamin Zephaniah performing and talking taken from Pamela Robertson-Pearce’s film To Do Wid Me which readers will be able access in full using the QR code printed in the book.
Pascale Petit was interviewed on Radio 3's The Verb on 13 November 2020. Listen here. She read poems from both Tiger Girl and Mama Amazonica at various points in the programme.
'Surprised!' from Tiger Girl was featured in the Spring 2021 issue of Oxford Review of Books. The collection was reviewed in great depth in their autumn 2020 issue here.
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.
[05 February 2025]
