italy
"Petrucci is of interest as one of the few contemporary poets exploring explicitly Italian themes and experiences
in the mainstream of British literature." Il Punto 65
Mario has published numerous poems concerned with Italy's recent history, his childhood experiences of rural life in Lazio, and Italian emigration following the IIWW.
Anglo-Italian themes feature prominently in his award-winning collections Shrapnel and Sheets and Flowers of Sulphur.
Securing a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Shrapnel and Sheets was praised by the judge John Fuller for its "sensitive poems" about Italian family life.
His long sequence Contadine won the prestigious Sheffield Thursday Poetry Prize. Mario has also transated Catullus, and his version of Montale's famous Xenia sequences secured a PEN Translates Award and a John Florio shortlisting. He was subsequently invited by the Society of Authors to co-judge the John Florio Prize (co-sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute and Arts Council England) in 2022, the same year in which his work was featured in the groundbreaking Anglo-Italian anthology Alibi: Prima antologia bilingue di poesia italiana nel Regno Unito (Ensemble Edizioni). He is currently working on a full-length collection entitled Monte Cassino.
Mario's views on cross-cultural discourse.
FURTHER INFORMATION copyright mario petrucci
2001
For Mario's detailed comments on the translation process and the shortlisted authors [John Florio Prize for Italian translation, 2022] click here
Click here to read an interview with Mario in the Italian journal Il Punto
Click here for the Italian Wikipedia entry on Mario
"Already, this new century seems as deafened by ideological clamour as the last, plagued by residues of cultural and literary separatism
sometimes bordering on a kind of 'aesthetic apartheid'. For nations increasingly brought face-to-face across cultural divides - chasms
that are now as much internal as external - the need for conversation, on its many levels, has never been more essential.
Poetry, with its potential for radical openness and self-revelation, is an ideal prompt and vehicle for that conversation.
Many kinds of voice continue to lie dormant in the English-speaking world; but we have at least begun to witness, in more recent times, some breakings of silence."
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