Poet | Novelist | Non-Fiction Author
Ruth Padel is an award-winning poet, author and novelist with close links to Greece, wildlife, classical music, nature and science — her recent pamphlet of poems, Watershed, explores water and climate denial.
She was born in London but has close links to Greece, and her novel Daughters of the Labyrinth, shortlisted for the Runciman and Anglo Hellenic Prizes, tells the story of the Holocaust on Crete, where she has lived on and off for many years.
Her twelve poetry collections, shortlisted for all major UK prizes, include Beethoven Variations (“She tells the great composer’s life story more profoundly than most biographies”, New York Times) and We Are All from Somewhere Else, a prose-and-poetry work on animal and human migration. Darwin: A Life in Poems was an innovative biography in poems of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin. Her first novel Where the Serpent Lives was on wildlife conservation in India.
Her non-fiction ranges from tiger conservation to the influence of Greek myth on rock music, and reading contemporary poetry.
Her poems have appeared in New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She has served as Chair of Judges for the T. S. Eliot and Forward Poetry Prizes, and as Judge for the International Man Booker Prize and Wellcome Trust Science Book Prize.
Awards include First Prize in the National Poetry Competition, a British Council Darwin Now Award, and a Cholmondley Prize from the Society of Authors. She is Fellow of the Zoological Society of London and Royal Society of Literature.
To contact Ruth, you can email her agent Robert Kirby: RKirby@unitedagents.co.uk
In More Detail
Ruth was born in London, in the attic of her great-aunt’s house in Wimpole Street, and comes from a background mainly of teachers, scientists, scholars and musicians. She has lived in Oxford, Cambridge and for many years off and on in Greece, but now lives again in London.
Through her mother Hilda, whose life, character and love of nature Ruth celebrates in her 2018 collection Emerald, she is one of seventy-two great-great-grandchildren of Charles Darwin. Her father John Padel, born in Carlisle, began as a schoolteacher, teaching Latin and Greek in Preston before he studied medicine in London and became a psychoanalyst. He taught Ruth ancient Greek, and she followed him into studying Classics at Oxford. She wrote a D.Phil. there, on Greek tragedy and ideas of the mind, studying for this on a scholarship at the Freie Universität, Berlin, the Sorbonne in Paris, and The British School of Archaeology at Athens.
From 1975, she worked as a classical scholar teaching ancient Greek at Oxford, Cambridge, Birkbeck College, London, and sometimes in Greece on the island of Kalymnos. She also lived in Crete, writing up her thesis and teaching English.
In 1984, she gave up academic tenure to write full time. She supported her writing by freelance journalism, broadcasting and teaching. From 1998 to 2001 she wrote The Sunday Poem, a weekly column on reading poems for the Independent on Sunday. In 2001 she began wildlife research for Tigers in Red Weather and her first novel Where the Serpent Lives, visiting tiger forests across Asia and the world’s only king cobra reserve, in South India. Since then, she has travelled extensively in India, where she enjoys meeting poetry and conservation colleagues and doing poetry readings (in, for instance Mumbai and at the Jaipur Festival). In 2018, she began a new line of conservation research in Tamil Nadu.
Ruth was First Resident Writer at Somerset House, 2008-9, where she inaugurated and curated a series of Writers’ Talks on paintings in the Courtauld Gallery, beginning with Philip Pullman on Renoir and Colm Tóibín on Cézanne, doing a talk herself on Bruegel’s ‘Flight into Egypt’. As Trustee of the Zoological Society of London, 2010-2013, she initiated and chaired a series of Writers’ Talks on endangered wild animals, pairing well-known writers with keepers, scientists, conservationists and specific wild animals, such as Mark Haddon with the Galapagos tortoise and Andrew Motion with sea horses, and contributing one herself on hummingbirds.
In 2013, she joined King’s College London, where she taught Creative Writing and became Professor of Poetry. In 2022, she resigned her chair, to finish a non-fiction book on elephants (to be published in 2024) and later gave an Inaugural and Valedictory Lecture, ‘Ebb and Flow’, reading poems from her book on water and climate denial, Watershed. You can watch the lecture here.
Ruth has one daughter, an anthropologist, and lives in London. She currently writers a column on reading poems for Prospect magazine: Poetry in Prospect.
Credit (all images on this page): Donna Ford