'One of the most prolific, versatile and, at his best, penetrating of our poets.' - Magma 30

biography

interviews with Mario Petrucci here         supplementary CV here         digest of achievements (2026) here

Mario's biography is complex, to say the least. Originally a Natural Sciences graduate, he moved into freelance writing after a stint in science teaching, a PhD in optoelectronics at UCL, organic farming/goat-herding in Ireland, and a further BA in Environmental Studies at Middlesex University. An early trailblazer for Ecopoetry in the UK, he was explicitly addressing the environment, and science, across entire collections long before this became (thankfully) unexceptional. Mario was inaugural Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University and (later) the Fellow at Westminster and Brunel Universities; most recently, he became RLF Fellow at the City and Guilds of London Art School. Complete sets of his major works are lodged with key libraries globally, including Harvard, Berkeley, Buffalo, Poets House (New York), Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (both Rome and Florence), Berlin State Library, UCL Small Press, and the Library of Congress. Recordings of his poems featured in the Archive of the Now repository, while in 2025 The Poetry Archive secured and made public a substantial holding of his audio work. In that same year, he was admitted to the USA's Poets & Writers Directory. The British Library acquired his entire literary archive, for long-term preservation and research, in 2023.

Mario's poetry performances attract international recognition (e.g., with the British Council and Poetry International), and he has received many awards for his work. From 1991 to 2005, he was outright winner in 22 national and international open poetry/writing competitions (with at least another 20 runners-up and thirds). He won the London Writers Competition a record four times, and was recipient of the 2002 Arvon/ Daily Telegraph International Poetry Prize (for his Chernobyl poem, source text for an award-winning poetry film by Seventh Art Productions). Notably, he was chosen by BBC News to compose a poem, featured in its national response to 9/11. Mario was also commissioned to construct the mammoth hybrid/poetry script for Tales from the Bridge, perhaps the world's largest and most ambitious 3D poetry soundscape. Spanning London's Millennium Bridge for the 2012 Olympics, this extraordinary intertextual sonic feast was shortlisted for the coveted Ted Hughes Award.

Two further projects of national significance deserve special mention: both were pioneering poetry residencies, and both of them historic firsts. One outcome of Mario's Imperial War Museum residency, Search and Create, involved composing and locating poems throughout the Lambeth Road site so as to fundamentally challenge how visitors perceived the museum artefacts. One poem imitated the action of a sniper; another posed a riddle; a third lulled you into the path of an oncoming tank. A worksheet spurred visitors and schoolchildren to write their own poems in response. So successful was this initiative that it endured across two decades, and was even translated to IWM North where poems jostled provocatively with captions or were stencilled monumentally onto the walls. Many thousands of schoolchildren were surprised and enchanted by these installations, or stilled by their visual and emotive impact. Meanwhile, Mario's Radio 3 residency brought to a national audience commentary and poems exploring the secret life of orchestras, their audiences, and the wealth of orchestral music-making across the UK. One pivotal aspect of this residency was to encourage youngsters to take up ‘Endangered Instruments’ such as the tuba and trombone.

So, what is Mario's work like? Often sumptuous and lyrically contemplative, his poetry could be described as a shifting eclectic mix of the confessional and the metaphysical. His early poems dwelt on romantic involvements, on his family/childhood memories of London and Italy, particularly war-related anecdotes or the subtle incongruences of Italian heritage playing out in an Anglophone education; but his juvenile creativity was equally stoked by an unshakeable sense of the spiritual nature of materiality and an innate devotion to the life force. That said, he delighted too, in paradoxical fashion, in open-mic/performance-driven slapstick writing and humour, in joyous vulgarities and harsh political satire. Enduring concerns in his oeuvre that hark back to his earliest output include: his immigrant family, with its psychological and actual bereavements; the realities of warfare; romantic intensity; love/unlove; science, medical procedures, and the insights of quantum physics; ecology, ecopoetics, the natural world under impossible strain; consciousness, mindfulness, the mysterious imperatives of Being. Although this plural alertness persists throughout his work, it did later noticeably crystallise into extensively intense explorations of love-loss and a more concerted, systematic neo-Modernist impetus that found ways to fully incorporate his ecological, metaphysical and concrete/spatial awarenesses. This developmental trajectory was itself punctuated by major public commissions that led to in-depth literary/site-specific interactions with key cultural organisations and locations, as well as a growing engagement with the translation of watershed poets hailing from diverse cultures and literary eras.

'Imaginative, sophisticated and effortlessly masterful... draws on the nature of raw experience
and revives it in an incredibly accurate, poignant way.' - Cambridge Student