Gwyneth Lewis & Pascale Petit | Two Poets, One Story
Thu 24 Apr 2025 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm



Two of our finest poets present their latest collections of moving, lyrical and ultimately redemptive poetry which reflect their experiences of family abuse. First Rain in Paradise relates to the emotional abuse Lewis received by her mother, also the subject of a memoir, Nightshade Mother. Pascale Petit’s latest collection Beast relates to her upbringing with abusive parents coupled with explorations of our abused planet, whilst her first novel My Hummingbird Father is a semi-autobiographical account of a young artist who has survived an abusive upbringing.
Venue: Newnham College
Duration: 1 hour
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Author Biography
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 seventh collection Mama Amazonica (2017), a Poetry Book Society Choice, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018 and the Laurel Prize 2020. Her eighth, Tiger Girl (2020), was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection and for the English language poetry category of Wales Book of the Year 2021. Four of her earlier six collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, while a portfolio from Fauverie won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. Her ninth collection, Beast (2025), is her third from Bloodaxe.
Gwyneth Lewis was Wales’s National Poet from 2005 to 2006, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. Her first six books of poetry in Welsh and English were followed by Chaotic Angels (2005) from Bloodaxe, which brings together the poems from her English collections, Parables & Faxes, Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum, and by A Hospital Odyssey (2010), and Sparrow Tree (2011), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012. With Rowan Williams she translated The Book of Taliesin (2019) for Penguin Classics. Her other books include Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression (2002) and Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling (2024). She received an MBE in 2022.