Competitions
Poetry competition 2025 winners
Read about the winners and shortlist here.
Subscribing to The Magazine
You can buy the Magazine or subscribe here
Poetry Submissions
Poetry submissions to the magazine.
"What news on the Rialto?"
Articles, featured poems, news, newsletters and events, new issues and publications, and submission calls.
News
The Rialto Does he still write Newsletters? Newsletter December 2021/January 2022
The Rialto 97 is printed and subscribers’ copies should have arrived. There’s been a long gap. I suspect that I might have found it difficult to return to the routine of reading submissions, having had a break from doing so while Degna was compiling No. 96. I also...
The Rialto issue 96, It’s not a war, it’s poetry
The Rialto’s successful Editor Development Programme brought several new editors into the fold under the tutelage of long standing Editor Michael Mackmin, and now three of them are to have free rein over their own issues thanks to further ACE funding. First up, is...
Rialto Newsletter February 2021
THE RIALTO FEBRUARY NEWS ‘I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausages and haddock by writing them down.’ Virginia Woolf HEADLINES THE RIALTO NATURE AND PLACE COMPETITION The closing date for the competition is rushing towards us. Please let us have...
Articles and newsletters
Summer 2019
‘I think this is a really good time for poetry. If anybody ever thought poetry was a luxury, that’s gone. Poetry is a necessary remedy to a lot of the darkness we are subject to.’ Tracy K Smith, USA Poet Laureate, The Observer 30.06.19 The Rialto No. 92 is now out in...
HOME (FOR A MONTH) IN GRASMERE
In March this year it was my great fortune to stay in Grasmere with the Wordsworth Trust as their poet in residence. The reach of the Trust is huge and I would urge anyone who doesn’t know about them to find out: https://wordsworth.org.uk/ The brief for the residency...
Magic in the reeds
Magic in the reeds: A day at Wicken Fen with Professor Nick Davies by Alexandra Davis “And I …will … Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmoset. I’ll bring thee To clustering filberts, and sometimes I’ll...
NATURE AND PLACE 2
It takes a lot of work to organise and administer a poetry competition and quite simply we wouldn’t be able to run it if we didn’t have help from volunteers. This year our help comes from undergraduates on the UEA Literature and Creative Writing courses. We invited...
NATURE AND PLACE 1
It takes a lot of work to organise and administer a poetry competition and quite simply we wouldn’t be able to run it if we didn’t have help from volunteers. This year our help comes from undergraduates on the UEA Literature and Creative Writing courses. We invited...
A POEM BY MICHAEL LONGLEY – NATURE AND PLACE COMPETITION JUDGE, 2018
THE LEVERET For my grandson, Benjamin This is your first night in Carrigskeewaun. The Owennadornaun is so full of rain You arrived in Paddy Morrison’s tractor, A bumpy approach in your father’s arms To the cottage where, all of one year ago, You were conceived, a...
About the rialto
WELCOME
Welcome to the website for The Rialto, where you can find out who we are and what we do, read poems from the magazine, and connect up with our social media pages. You can buy subscriptions, single copies, pamphlets and books. You can learn how to submit your poetry for possible publication, and you can read articles and blogs by the editors, poets and guest writers.
The Rialto magazine is edited by Michael Mackmin working with Rishi Dastidar, Edward Doegar, Will Harris and Degna Stone, who are graduates of our Editor Development Programme.
We’d like to say thank you to our loyal subscribers and to the Arts Council of England whose support and encouragement over years have made possible The Rialto. We invite you, reader, to join the team: help make poetry happen by subscribing now.
THE MAGAZINE
The founding editors, Michael among them, believed in a ‘Republic of Poetry’, an inclusive and diverse world of poetry, one that was open to experiment in form and content. We strive to keep this vision alive.
The magazine appears three times a year and each issue, with its spacious A4 pages, has fifty or so poems, an editorial and occasional, commissioned, prose pieces. Most of the space is occupied by the best new poems we can find, all wrapped up in our famously vibrant beautiful covers.
The Rialto has been called ‘Simply the best’ by Carol Ann Duffy and ‘A terrific magazine’ by Seamus Heaney.
BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS
At the start of the new millennium The Rialto published a short run of first collections. In 2005 we turned our energy to publishing pamphlets and began our Bridge Pamphlets list. These have so far been by poets who we’ve asked to submit work. We also run a poetry pamphlet competition which has become a fixture of how we discover new work. Oh, and we haven’t forgotten about first collections – we launched Dean Parkin’s The Swan Machine at last autumn’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, and published Matt Howard’s award winning Gall in 2018.
Laura Scott’s pamphlet What I Saw won the Michael Marks Award in 2014, and several of our first collections are winners of major awards.
“The Rialto is the poetry magazine to read – publishing poems that are formally inventive and alive to the ‘here and now’ of the world, but always with a commitment to the humane and compassionate qualities I believe the best poetry has. It has led the way in nurturing new talent.”
“The magazine is consistently one of, if not the best spotter of emerging talent in the UK – as a writer you know that you have arrived if one of your poems goes in. It’s more than an imprimatur of quality – it’s a rite of passage.”
