Mario Petrucci (born 1958) 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.[1] 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[2] and with BBC Radio 3.[3][4][5]
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.[6] 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.[7] 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;[8] in 2022, the Kyiv Post published his Ukraine-themed war poem to mark the intensified conflict with Russia.[9]
Literary record
Petrucci's poetry debut, Shrapnel and Sheets (1996), won a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.[10] Ensuing literary awards include the Irish Times Perpetual Trophy, the Daily Telegraph/ Arvon International Poetry Prize, the London Writers Competition (four times), the Sheffield Thursday Prize (twice), 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.[6] His poetry has had coverage in such outlets as The Spectator, The Independent,[11] 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.[1]
2012 saw Petrucci shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award[12][13] with a large-scale poetry soundscape entitled Tales from the Bridge.[14][15][16][17][18] 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".[19] Collaborators for the project included Martyn Ware (The Human League) 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.[20]
An early exponent of modern Ecopoetry and a long-term contributor to science poetry, Petrucci is included in the Archive of the Now (audio recordings of modern UK poets) and in the Poets & Writers Directory (USA).[21] Specialist libraries worldwide hold full sets of his published collections, including: (Europe) BNC Rome, BNC Florence, Berlin State Library and UCL small press; and (USA) Poets House (New York), Harvard, Berkeley, Buffalo and the Library of Congress.[6] 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.[22]
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 (the latter often centred on relationships, childhood, or his Italian heritage and family); these plural concerns later condensed into extensive explorations of intensely felt love/loss and a more systematically neo-modernist drive (with eco-aware, metaphysical and 'concrete' leanings), punctuated by public commissions and a growing engagement with influential authors from other cultures and epochs.[1][6]
This intricate aesthetic journey culminated in the vast i tulips sequence, Petrucci's notable avant-garde undertaking consisting of 1111 poems (with a 1111-line coda in 11 parts) described by the Poetry Book Society as an "ambitious landmark body of work”.[23] 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".[1] 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.[24] 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 (by Seventh Art Productions)[25] built around his award-winning poetry sequence on the Chernobyl disaster.[26] 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 (in 2007).[27] 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.[28]
Cultural, Educational, Cross-disciplinary (science-ecology-arts) work
Petrucci's poems, short stories, articles and essays often investigate cross-disciplinary concerns (creativity, politics, science, the environment),[29] such as the role of eco-art in dissolving society's resistance to pro-environmental change,[30] or the cross-fertilisation of disciplines by applying 'Scientific Visualizations' as visual analogies to specific literary aspects of the humanities.[31][32][33] 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 (Belgrade, 2025) for its 'International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development'.[34]
One of Petrucci's several critical-theoretical innovations in poetry is his nesting of concrete poetry within a larger concept he terms Spatial Form.[a][52] 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.[53][54] Petrucci also coined the critical terms 'Poeclectics',[55][56] 'sonic stitching',[57] and the new prose sub-genre 'Eco-sci-fi Flash Fiction'.[30] Many of his technical ideas and writing techniques are embedded within the Writing Into Freedom initiative, comprising an archived (non-commercial) YouTube channel and companion website which provide an archived resource documenting Petrucci's writing practice and fellowship output.[58]
[a] - Petrucci's formulation of Spatial Form is not to be confused with Joseph Frank's unrelated 1945 term, dealing primarily with the abstract patterning of internal references and narratives implemented by an author across a work in order to create a unitary structure of meaning.[65]
↑ Petrucci, Mario (2011). "Scientific Visualizations: Bridge-Building between the Sciences and the Humanities via Visual Analogy". Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. 36 (4): 276–300. doi:10.1179/030801811X13160755918561. S2CID62643801.
↑ McLoughlin, Nigel (2016). "Spatial Form". The Portable Poetry Workshop. London: Palgrave Macmillan/ Red Globe Press/ Bloomsbury. ISBN9780230522305. OCLC990192945.
↑ Petrucci, Mario (2006). "Spatial Form: a new way of looking at poetic form". Writing in Education (40): 37–40. ISSN1361-8539.
↑ Petrucci, Mario (2006). "Making Voices: Identity, Poeclectics and the Contemporary British Poet". The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. 3 (1): 66–77. doi:10.2167/new058.0. S2CID53523734.
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