Tiger Girl - Paperback

by Pascale Petit (Author)

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 - and the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020. Four of her earlier collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2021 (Poetry)

Shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection

Author Biography

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 Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018 and won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018. Her eighth collection, Tiger Girl, was published by Bloodaxe in 2020. She published six previous poetry collections. Her sixth, Fauverie (Seren, 2014), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. 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. She was Poetry Editor of Poetry London from 1989 to 2005 and is a co-founding tutor of 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, Ploughshares 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.