Mario Petrucci (born 1958) is a British-Italian poet, literary translator, educator and broadcaster, known for his work in science-related poetry 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] After his early scientific career, Petrucci shifted to literary projects, serving as the first poet-in-residence at the Imperial War Museum[2] and BBC Radio 3.[3][4][5]
Petrucci's work with poetry and film occurs in educational, cultural and community settings, addressing human conflict, environmental issues, science, and public and private memory.[6] His broadcast outlets include 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, his regular column for The Day Digest in Ukraine explored the philosophy of art and society,[8] while in 2022 the Kyiv Post published his Ukraine-based poem in response to "challenging times".[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 Arvon International Poetry Prize (with The Daily Telegraph), 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 appeared in The Spectator, The Independent,[11] the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, with his collections often relating to specific cultural sites, or focusing on love/loss, the tragedies of warfare, and science in the natural world.[1]
Petrucci was shortlisted for the 2012 Ted Hughes Award[12][13] with a poetry soundscape, 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, featuring interleaving spoken elements "assembled from literary forms such as short poems, atmospheric descriptions, local anecdotes, facts and figures".[19] Collaborators for the project included Martyn Ware (Heaven 17) and Eric Whitacre, whose music was used. The soundscape played for two months along the length of the Millennium Bridge and was "experienced by an estimated four million people".[20]
A contributor since the 1980s to science poetry and Ecopoetry,[21] Petrucci was appointed ‘Ecopoetry Network Coordinator’ to the Planetary Arts Movement in 2026, under the auspices of The World Academy of Art & Science.[22] He is also included in the Archive of the Now (audio recordings of modern UK poets) and in the Poets & Writers Directory (USA).[21] His published collections are held internationally, 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 by the British Library, and The Poetry Archive acquired a number of his audio recordings for public and educational access in 2025.[23]
Poetry, translation, film
A poet with a substantial body of work, Petrucci's style and forms have evolved across time. His early poetry was varied, by turns spiritual/devotional, open-mic/humour/performance-oriented, political/satirical, ecopoetic/scientific, site-specific, war-related and confessional (the latter often centred on relationships, childhood, or his Italian heritage and family); later work focused more consistently on love/loss and followed a more systematic 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]
At this stage, Petrucci initiated the i tulips sequence, an experimental project that represented a major phase in his neo‑modernist development. Comprising 1111 poems with a 1111-line coda in 11 parts, the Poetry Book Society described it as an “ambitious landmark body of work”.[24] Endorsed by Roy Fisher and Bill Berkson, the sequence combines imagery and musicality within a newly developed undulating form, producing what one critic termed “an energetic fusion of American and British modernism”.[1] Alongside this, Petrucci has been involved in 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.[25] He has published versions of Catullus, Sappho, Rumi, Saadi and the Nobel-winning Eugenio Montale.
Petrucci's poetry has been used in several films. Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl and Half Life: a Journey to Chernobyl were two sibling features by Seventh Art Productions,[26] built around his poetry sequence on the Chernobyl disaster.[27] 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).[28] He later scripted the art film Amazonia, set in Peru, commissioned by the Natural History Museum, London to comment on the global role of rainforests.[29]
Cultural, Educational, Cross-disciplinary (science-ecology-arts) work
Petrucci's poems, short stories, articles and essays often engage in a cross-disciplinary way with creativity, politics, science and the environment.[30] He examines the role of eco-art in countering the resistance to pro-environmental change,[31] as well as the interaction between disciplines when 'Scientific Visualizations' are applied as visual analogies to specific literary aspects of the humanities.[32][33][34] He has undertaken cross-disciplinary commissions involving sustainability and the arts, delivering talks for the British Council and the United Nations, including the UN's "first major event" (Belgrade, 2025) for its 'International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development'.[35]
For several decades, Petrucci has also been involved in the educational sector,[36][37][38] in creative writing and literary mentoring, as facilitator for youth and diversity, and in the incorporation of science and ecology with creative writing praxis.[39][40][41] He was founder/co-founder for several 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 literary workshops and events, along with grassroots competitions for emerging writers.[6] His various roles have included being inaugural pamphlet selector for the Poetry Book Society between 2003 and 2005, awarding the prize to early work by poets Frances Leviston and Daljit Nagra.[42]
Petrucci has proposed the concept of Spatial Form, a framework that extends concrete poetry to include all the visual detail of a poem.[a][54][55] He has also introduced the critical terms 'Poeclectics'[56][57] and 'sonic stitching',[58] as well as the prose sub-genre 'Eco-sci-fi Flash Fiction'.[31] Petrucci’s Writing Into Freedom initiative is an archived non-commercial YouTube channel and its companion website, documenting his writing exercises and fellowship work.[59]
[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.[66]
↑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.
↑"Spatial Form: a new way of looking at poetic form". Writing in Education (40): 37–40. 2006. 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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