Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French, Welsh, and Indian heritage. Her eighth collection, Tiger Girl (2020), won an RSL Literature Matters Award while in progress, and a poem from the book won the 2020 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. Tiger Girl was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection and for the English language poetry category shortlist for Wales Book of the Year 2021. Her seventh collection Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), a Poetry Book Society Choice, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018 and the Laurel Prize 2020, and was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018. 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). A portfolio of poems from that book won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. 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 is published by Salt in 2024. Her books have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Serbian and French. She is widely travelled in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon, China, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Mexico and India. Her fifth collection, What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, published by Seren in 2010 (UK) and Black Lawrence Press in 2011 (US), was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year. Two of her previous books, The Zoo Father and The Huntress, were also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected Petit as one of the Next Generation Poets.

'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

'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

'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 exploitation and cruelty... alarming, mythic, beautiful...' - Alexandra Harris, chair of Forward Prize judges

'I think this might be her best book so far because of this complexity of a family in crisis against a planet in crisis - she's very much a poet of the environment... She has a powerful, imagistic authority over the landscape. It's a very moving, powerful book.' - Daljit Nagra, reviewing Tiger Girl on BBC Radio 4's Front Row

'Family history is at the heart of Pascale Petit's Tiger Girl, the story of her grandmother, born in Rajasthan to her father's maid but brought up as his wife's child....Petit is a passionate laureate of the natural world, but alive to the cruelty of human depredation...' - Aingeal Clare, The Guardian

'Petit emerges as a strong voice of and for the natural world in this dazzling collection of eco-poems that unfolds like a poetic canopy of lush, throbbing images of the forests and fauna in Central India, dappled by the memories of her grandmother, the tiger girl. She explores her multiracial roots and childhood complexities as she reimagines and reconstructs matrilineal love and loss through the face and history of her 'tiger-gran', tracing it in the heart of the beasts and the wild, that is fraught with the ravages of environmental cruelty.' - The Telegraph India ('Nine powerful books of poetry')

'Pascale Petit's Mama Amazonica powerfully twists together fantasy and experience. Over a sustained sequence of poems, Petit transfigures her mother's desperate and disturbed life through fabulous imagery of the rainforest and its flora and fauna, moving towards a kind of extreme, Ovidian release into metamorphosis. It won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize this year, a first for a book of poetry.' - Marina Warner, The Tablet (Books of the Year 2018)

2018 Ondaatje Prize judges Tahmima Anam, Eva Hoffman and Daljit Nagra on Mama Amazonica:

'Mama Amazonica is an unforgettable read - rich with metaphor, the poems explode on the page with the multiple narratives of motherhood, illness, pain, and redemption. All of this set in a rainforest that is both mythic and vividly alive. This is a book that feels almost magical in its unlikeliness, and that for me is what made it a clear winner.' - Tahmima Anam

'Rarely has the personal and environmental lament found such imaginative fusion, such outlandish and shocking expression that is at once spectacularly vigorous, intimate and heartbroken.' - Daljit Nagra

'In Pascale Petit's evocations, the Amazon rainforest comes alive, with human characters as much a part of nature as the creatures and plants living there - alluring and frightening, violent and vulnerable, dangerous and endangered. A feat of imaginative intensity, this is also an act of reckoning and reparation, in which deep empathy for a disturbed mother is transmuted into the exacting beauty of poetic language.' - Eva Hoffman