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 Poetry event in the CCI
Images from The Rialto event in the CCI (Cambridge Conservation Initiative) Attenborough Building on Monday July 7. A celebration of the 2024/2025 Nature and Place Poetry Competition: CCI are partners with us in this competition, as are the RSPB, Birdlife...
Nature and Place winners 2025 announced
Nature and Place winners 2025 We have now received the results of the 2025 Nature and Place Poetry Competition back from Helen Mort and are delighted to announce that the winners are: 1st Prize of £1000 – ‘Beryl’ – Rosamund Taylor2nd Prize of £500 – ‘crossing fields’...
Withdrawal from Twitter/X
The Rialto as an organisation has always reviewed its use of social media over our time on all the platforms we inhabit. Over the last two years the advisory board have become increasingly uncomfortable using Twitter/X. We have already pulled back from anything much...
Articles and newsletters
Midwinter: Part 2
THE RIALTO MIDWINTER NEWSLETTER: PART 2 An error. We are, of course, publishing three new pamphlets. The one I forgot to mention in Part 1 of the Newsletter is John Whale’s, Wayward Observations. As to What’s in R103, here is the list of poets included: Juliet Antill,...
Midwinter: Part 1
THE RIALTO MIDWINTER NEWSLETTER: PART 1 Points to note: R103 is currently being printed R103 will be mailed out first week of January R104 Discussion of delays and plans for the future Subscriptions R104 due spring 2026, R105 due September 2026 Submittable...
The Dark Night of the Soul
I woke this morning muddle-headed about dreams and trying to recall what grandiose scheme I had had about righting the world’s wrongs. That didn’t seem possible, so then I turned my mind, as one does, to the question of making a translation of that poem by St John of...
The other Tuesday
The other Tuesday, it was a January Tuesday, I had no clients so decided to treat myself to a proper birding expedition (something I do with increasing irregularity now). I’d got my year list off to a pretty good start early in the month with a walk at Hickling where...
Nature and Place: A Personal Statement
I was told that my first words, lisped in the early 1940s, were ‘flowers’ and ‘airplanes’. So here was Nature. And the place? A new build (finished in 1938) of small, pebble-dashed, semis and detacheds and a couple of terraces a short walk from the terminus of London...
Questions and Answers
Q. How do I find out what sort of poems The Rialto publishes? So I can select from my poems ones that they’ll like. A. The answer to that used to be simply buy the magazine and read it. However recent issues (96, 98, 100) have been guest edited (by Degna Stone, Edward...
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.”
