Animals and Healing with Jay Griffiths and Pascal Petit

An evening with poet Pascale Petit and author Jay Griffiths.

Shamans have always said that it is the animals who heal us. Pascale Petit’s work demonstrates poetry as a kind of shamanism, allowing author and reader to shapeshift in the imagination, and the animals are the constant medicine in her work. Jay Griffiths’ new book encompasses how animals heal the society as well as the psyche, electrifying our minds and vitalising our cultures.

Together Jay and Pascale will create an event that shows, through both personal experience and their writing, that animals are our healers. They will be discussing their experiences, reading from their work, and opening up the conversation to the audience.

About the speakers:

Pascale Petit’s travels have taken her to the Amazon rainforest and India. She was a co-founding tutor of the Poetry School, and in 2018 she was elected as a Royal Society of Literature Fellow.

Pascale’s ninth collection, Beast, published by Bloodaxe in April 2025, won the Society of Authors’ Arthur Welton Prize and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her books have won the Ondaatje Prize and the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecopoetry.

Jay Griffiths has swum with wild otters in a loch in Scotland and was one of the Red Rebels supporting Extinction Rebellion. She won the Discover award for best first-time author in the US, as well as the inaugural Orion award and a Hay Festival International Fellowship.

In How Animals Heal Us, Jay explores how animals can have a role in every level of healing, from the individual to the collective, guiding us in how we might create societies that are healthier, fairer and kinder.

Pascale Petit photo credited to Derrick Kakembo.

This is a free event. Any donations will raise money for The Resurgence Trust, an educational charity that seeks to connect people to Nature, to each other and to themselves. (no. 1120414). It is thanks to the generosity of supporters of The Resurgence Trust that we are able to offer free events.

For more events from The Resurgence Trust head to www.resurgenceevents.org