Mario Petrucci was born in 1958 to Italian parents. His collection Shrapnel and Sheets (Headland, 1996) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, while Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl (Enitharmon, 2004) secured the Daily Telegraph/Arvon Prize and was made into an internationally award-winning film. i tulips (Enitharmon, 2010) takes its name from Petrucci’s 1111-strong Anglo-American modernist sequence, of which the waltz in my blood (Waterloo, 2011), anima (Nine Arches, 2013) and crib (Enitharmon, 2014) are also parts. His translations include Sappho (2008), Catullus (2006) – both with Perdika Press – and Eugenio Montale’s Xenia (Arc, 2016), winner of a PEN Translates award. His immense 3D poetry soundscape, Tales from the Bridge, spanned the Thames for the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. Petrucci has held major poetry residencies at the Imperial War Museum and with BBC Radio 3. He is also an ecologist, PhD physicist and Royal Literary Fund Fellow. His translation, Beloved: 81 poems from Hafez, is published by Bloodaxe in September 2018.
Author photograph: Jemimah Kuhfeld
