Pascale Petit's Tiger Girl marks a shift from the Amazonian rainforests of her previous work to explore her grandmother's Indian heritage and the fauna and flora of subcontinental jungles. Tiger girl is the grandmother, with her tales of wild tigers, but she's also the endangered predators Petit encountered in Central India. In exuberant and tender ecopoems, the saving grace of love in an otherwise bleak childhood is celebrated through spellbinding visions of nature, alongside haunting images of poaching and species extinction. Tiger Girl is Pascale Petit's eighth collection, and her second from Bloodaxe, following Mama Amazonica, winner of the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize 2018 - the first time a poetry book won this prize for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry best evoking the spirit of a place. It is shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Four of her earlier collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French/Welsh/Indian heritage. Her seventh collection, Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) was Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2017, was shortlisted for the inaugural Laurel Prize in 2020 and for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018 and won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018. Her eight collection, Tiger Girl, was published by Bloodaxe in 2020 and shortlisted for the Forward Prize. She has published six previous poetry collections, four of which have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, most recently, her sixth collection, Fauverie (Seren, 2014). A portfolio of poems from this book won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a 2015 Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and was the chair of the judges for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize. Her books have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Serbian and French. She is widely travelled in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon, China, Kazakhstan, Nepal, and Mexico. 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, Wales Book of the Year, and was Jackie Kay's Book of the Year in the Observer. Two of her previous books, The Zoo Father and The Huntress, were also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and were Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement and Independent. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected Petit as one of the Next Generation Poets. Petit has received six major awards from Arts Council England. The Zoo Father was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. A poem from the book, 'The Strait-Jackets', was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. A Spanish/English edition is published in Mexico and Spain, an illustrated Serbian edition in Belgrade, and her selected poems Fauverie are published in a bilingual edition in China. She was Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 1989 to 2005 and is a co-founding tutor of The Poetry School. She has co-edited Tying the Song (Enitharmon, 2000) the first anthology from The Poetry School. Her poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, The Poetry Archive and ABC Radio National, and published widely in journals around the world, including in Poetry, Poetry Review, American Poetry Review and Quadrant. They have been translated into 18 languages. She taught popular poetry courses in the galleries at Tate Modern for nine years, and currently tutors for the Arvon Foundation and Ty Newydd. She was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art 2011-12. Petit has translated poems by Yang Lian, Zhai Yongming, Wang Xiaoni, Xiao Kaiyu, Xi Chuan, Zhou Zan and Amir Or. She has given readings nationally and internationally, including at Tampico International Literature Festival in Mexico, Yellow Mountain Festival in China, Sha'ar Poetry Festival in Israel, Estonia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Kathmandu, Belgrade and America, and at numerous UK venues including Tate Modern, Royal Festival Hall, the British Museum, Ways With Words, Aldeburgh, Ledbury, Cheltenham, StAnza and Hay Festivals. She spent the first part of her life as a sculptor and trained at the Royal College of Art. As an artist she held numerous exhibitions, including on the London Underground, in the Natural History Museum, London, Arnolfini Bristol, Ferens Gallery Hull, and participated in the feminist touring exhibition Pandora's Box in 1984-85.
Title: Tiger Girl
Author: Pascale Petit
ISBN: 9781780375267
Binding:
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publication Date: 2020-09-03
Number of Pages: 112
Weight: 0.1801 kg
No one writing in English today comes anywhere near the exuberance of Pascale Petit. 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 * (judge for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018) *
Beautifully sad, the imagery inexhaustible, the sorrow and torment both tempered and sharpened by the relish for language and the ingenuity of the imagination. -- Simon Armitage * [on Mama Amazonica] *
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) *
