Mario Petrucci


Mario Petrucci is a British-Italian poet, literary translator, educator and broadcaster, particularly active as a science poet and in Ecopoetry. He was born in Lambeth, London and trained as a physicist at Selwyn College in the University of Cambridge, later completing a PhD in vacuum crystal growth at University College London. He is also an ecologist, having a BA in Environmental Science from Middlesex University. Breaking with his early scientific career, Petrucci increasingly focussed on his literary projects, becoming the first poet to be resident at the Imperial War Museum and with BBC Radio 3.
Petrucci utilises poetry and film in a variety of educational, cultural and community settings so as to engage public or academic audiences with human conflict, environmental issues and science, whilst also encouraging an exploration of personal and historic memory. He has used many media channels to disseminate his work: his broadcasting experience includes BBC radio’s Kaleidoscope, London Nights, Sunday Feature, Night Waves, The Verb and the BBC World Service, as well as BBC TV.
Between 2011 and 2013, Petrucci wrote a regular column for The Day Digest, offering philosophical reflections on art and society for Ukrainians during a period of political and cultural change; in 2022, the Kyiv Post published his Ukraine-themed war poem to mark the intensified conflict with Russia.

Literary record

Petrucci's poetry debut, Shrapnel and Sheets, won a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Ensuing literary awards include the Irish Times Perpetual Trophy, the Daily Telegraph/ Arvon International Poetry Prize, the London Writers Competition, the Sheffield Thursday Prize, the Bridport Poetry Prize, and the Silver Wyvern Award. Altogether, between 1991 and 2005, Petrucci won a total of 22 national and international open poetry competitions. His poetry has had coverage in such outlets as The Spectator, The Independent, the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, with his diverse collections drawing inspiration from specific cultural sites, or exploring his recurrent themes of love/loss, the tragedies of warfare, and science in the natural world.
2012 saw Petrucci shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award with a large-scale poetry soundscape entitled Tales from the Bridge. Commissioned by the Mayor of London, this installation spanned the Thames as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Petrucci created a hybrid script of prose and poetry, designed for interleaving voices to generate sonic texture, "assembled from literary forms such as short poems, atmospheric descriptions, local anecdotes, facts and figures". Collaborators for the project included Martyn Ware and Eric Whitacre, whose music was used. The soundscape played for two months along the entire length of the Millennium Bridge and was experienced by an estimated 4 million people.
An early exponent of modern Ecopoetry and a long-term contributor to science poetry, Petrucci is included in the Archive of the Now and in the Poets & Writers Directory. Specialist libraries worldwide hold full sets of his published collections, including: BNC Rome, BNC Florence, Berlin State Library and UCL small press; and Poets House, Harvard, Berkeley, Buffalo and the Library of Congress. In 2023, his literary archive was acquired in perpetuity by the British Library, and The Poetry Archive incorporated his audio recordings for public and educational access in 2025.

Poetry, translation, film

A prolific poet, Petrucci's style and forms have constantly evolved. His early output has been characterised as a shifting eclectic mix: this work was, by turns, spiritual/devotional, open-mic/humour/performance-oriented, politically-conscious/satirical, ecopoetic/scientific, site-specific, war-related and confessional ; these plural concerns later condensed into extensive explorations of intensely felt love/loss and a more systematically neo-modernist drive, punctuated by public commissions and a growing engagement with influential authors from other cultures and epochs. 
This intricate aesthetic journey culminated in the vast i tulips sequence, Petrucci's notable avant-garde undertaking consisting of 1111 poems described by the Poetry Book Society as an "ambitious landmark body of work”. Endorsed by Roy Fisher and Bill Berkson, the project combined imagery and musicality with a freshly-invented undulating form, proceeding through hundreds of variations, to generate "an energetic fusion of American and British modernism". Alongside this, Petrucci has been occupied with literary translation: 2018 brought his English versions of the Persian mystic poet Hafez via Bloodaxe Books, and in 2022 he was invited by the Society of Authors to judge the John Florio Prize for Italian translation. He has published versions of Catullus, Sappho, Rumi, Saadi and the Nobel-winning Eugenio Montale.
Petrucci's poetry has also been deployed in a number of films. Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl and Half Life: a Journey to Chernobyl were two sibling features built around his award-winning poetry sequence on the Chernobyl disaster. Voiced by Juliet Stevenson, David Threlfall and Samuel West, these films have received awards such as the Cinequest, as well as screenings on mainstream television and at Tate Modern. He later scripted the art film Amazonia, set in Peru, commissioned and showcased by the Natural History Museum, London to highlight the degradation and global role of rainforests.

Cultural, Educational, Cross-disciplinary (science-ecology-arts) work

Petrucci's poems, short stories, articles and essays often investigate cross-disciplinary concerns, such as the role of eco-art in dissolving society's resistance to pro-environmental change, or the cross-fertilisation of disciplines by applying 'Scientific Visualizations' as visual analogies to specific literary aspects of the humanities.
He has fulfilled numerous cross-disciplinary commissions involving sustainability and the arts, delivering talks for the British Council and the United Nations, including the UN's flagship event for its 'International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development'.
For several decades, Petrucci has also been much occupied in the educational sector, in creative writing and literary mentoring, as facilitator for youth and diversity, and as a forerunner in melding scientific and ecological awareness with creative writing praxis. He was founder/co-founder for a number of London-based literary initiatives, including: the poetry magazine The Bound Spiral; the experimental collaborative 'co-vocal' poetry performance troupe ShadoWork; and the Arts Council/ London Arts funded organisation writers inc., which ran a variety of cutting-edge literary workshops and events, along with grassroots competitions designed to uncover fresh talent. His facilitating roles include, for example, inaugural pamphlet selector for the Poetry Book Society between 2003 and 2005, bringing early attention to such voices as Frances Leviston and Daljit Nagra.
Across multiple literary roles, Petrucci has also engaged with a wide range of cultural organisations, including the Royal Festival Hall, the Charles Dickens Museum, Southwell Workhouse, the Royal [College of Surgeons of England], the European Space Agency, the London School of Economics, the Wellcome Collection, and the Natural History Museum, London; he was also Royal Literary Fund Fellow on four occasions, at Oxford Brookes University, University of Westminster, Brunel University London, and the City and [Guilds of London Art School].

Critical ideas

One of Petrucci's several critical-theoretical innovations in poetry is his nesting of concrete poetry within a larger concept he terms Spatial Form.#Notes| This goes far beyond the overt spatial signals generated by a poem’s concrete shape or its chosen form and layout: Spatial Form incorporates all aspects of the poem's visual gestalt as physically manifested on the page, including such subtleties as typeface or the visual textures of repeated letters. Petrucci also coined the critical terms 'Poeclectics', 'sonic stitching', and the new prose sub-genre 'Eco-sci-fi Flash Fiction'. Many of his technical ideas and writing techniques are embedded within the Writing Into Freedom initiative, comprising an archived YouTube channel and companion website which provide an archived resource documenting Petrucci's writing practice and fellowship output.

Books and pamphlets

  • Shrapnel and Sheets .
  • Bosco &.
  • Lepidoptera &.
  • The Stamina of Sheep .
  • The Havering Poetry Study Pack .
  • High Zest and the Doggerel March
  • Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl .
  • Half Life .
  • Fearnought or.
  • Catullus .
  • Flowers of Sulphur .
  • somewhere is january .
  • Sappho .
  • i tulips .
  • Nights * Sifnos * Hands .
  • the waltz in my blood .
  • the inward garden .
  • anima .
  • crib .
  • 1111 .
  • Xenia .
  • Beloved: 81 poems from Hafez .
  • Isha Upanishad .
  • afterlove .
  • Dawn Ravens .
  • Moonbird : love poems .

    Films

  • Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl Seventh Art Productions, 2006.
  • Half Life: a journey to Chernobyl Seventh Art Productions, 2006.
  • Amazonia, commissioned by the Natural History Museum, 2010.

    Awards

  • 1993 Winner, London Writers Competition
  • 1995 Edith Kitt Memorial Award
  • 1996 Poetry Book Society Recommendation
  • 1996 Edith Kitt Memorial Award
  • 1997 Winner, Sheffield Thursday Prize
  • 1997 Winner, inaugural Irish Times Perpetual Trophy
  • 1998 New London Writers Award
  • 1998 Winner, London Writers Competition
  • 1998 Winner, Sheffield Thursday Prize
  • 1999 Bridport Poetry Prize
  • 2002 Daily Telegraph / Arvon International Poetry Prize
  • 2002 Arts Council England Writers' Award
  • 2003 Essex Book Awards Best Fiction Prize 2000–2002
  • 2003 Silver Wyvern Award
  • 2004 Winner, London Writers Competition
  • 2004 National Poetry Competition: third prize cum laude
  • 2005/2006 Arts Council England Grants for the Arts: Science in Poetry
  • 2005 Winner, London Writers Competition
  • 2007 Cinequest Film Festival Award, Best Short Documentary
  • 2009/10 Arts Council England Grants for the Arts: i tulips
  • 2012 Shortlisted for The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry: Tales from the Bridge
  • 2016 Winner, PEN Translates Award
  • 2018 Shortlisted: John Florio Prize for Italian Translation