Pascale Gouverneur is also a judge on the erbacce-prize panel; her prime responsibility is for cover-designs and all our art-work. Pascale is based in the university town of Louvain-la-Neuve. She is a poet and artist who read English and Dutch literature and linguistics at the Université Saint-Louis Bruxelles and at the Université catholique de Louvain where she was a full-time lecturer teaching English grammar and phonetics on the BA courses (Faculty of Translation and Interpreting) and literary translation on the MA courses.

Her linguistic experience spans three worlds: born in Geel, Flanders, she grew up speaking Dutch before moving to Wallonia learning French, then to Libya where she was exposed to English and Arabic from an early age. Multiculturalism expanded with family in Britain, Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, Sicily and the Philippines.

Her artwork, mainly pencil and oil, explores the portrait and the bestiary. Her pencil portraits of poets have been selected for the catalogue by the Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre in London. She was part of the third BINaïf international exhibition in Socorro, Brazil in 2021 (Bienal Internacional de Arte Naïf Totem Cor-Ação), and she illustrated Our Beating Heart (Ed. Jacqui Dunne) with evocative line drawings.

Her poems have appeared in Magma#51, erbacce#30 (Editors’Choice), erbacce#44, erbacce#50 and Hildegard, visions & inspiration (an anthology edited by Gabriel Griffin). Pascale was a finalist of the 2015 erbacce-prize for poetry. Her first full, perfect-bound collection, What sort of scream? was published by erbacce-press. She has been invited to do readings mainly at The Troubadour in London, at the Bristol Poetry Festival, at the Poetry on the Lake festival in Orta, Italy. She organised a superbly received poetry and art event at Librebook in Brussels. In 2018, she published the brilliant and highly acclaimed Pièce de résistance (erbacce-press) which is an innovative play written in unstructured poetic form. More recently, she published Capriccio (2023), taking you down whimsical lane, and Catalogue Raisonné - A Corpus-based Study of Patience (erbacce-press, 2024). The collection examines the patient’s progress through breast cancer.

Pascale will be our euro-representative and her exceptionally sharp eye for all things ‘new’ will make her an invaluable judge on the annual erbacce-prize. Her artistic talents will help our poets to create amazing covers for their books.