Bio

In Short…

Ruth Padel is a London-based British poet and writer, author of the lyric biography Darwin – A Life in Poems and Tigers in Red Weather, a first-hand account of tiger conservation. She has published eight poetry collections, a novel, and eight non-fiction works including several much-loved books on reading poetry. She is a well-known radio broadcaster and currently presents Poetry Workshop, a landmark BBC 4 series of programmes on writing poems. Ruth is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Zoological Society of London, and a Bye-Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Her awards include First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition, a Cholmondeley Award from The Society of Authors, an Arts Council of England Writers’ Award, and a British Council Darwin Now Research Award for her novel Where the Serpent Lives. Her new book The Mara Crossing is an innovative meditation on migration – both animal and human – in both poems and prose.

In more detail…

Ruth began as a classicist and studied Greek at Oxford, doing a PhD under E.R. Dodds and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, but also researching at the Freie Universität, Berlin (teaching horse-riding there meanwhile), the Sorbonne, and at the British School of Archaeology in Athens, for which she worked on Minoan excavations in Crete.

From 1974-1984 she taught Greek. In Oxford, she was the first Bowra Fellow of Wadham College, Research Fellow at Wolfson, and Lecturer at Corpus Christi and Wadham Colleges. In Cambridge she was Lecturer at Kings College; in London at Birkbeck College. She has taught Myth in Buenos Aires University Psychology Department, and Opera in the Modern Greek Department of Princeton. In 1984 she gave up tenure to write. Her first publication was a poetry pamphlet, Alibi, in 1985, followed by a full-length collection Summer Snow in 1990.
Since then Ruth has published nineteen books. Her first non-fiction (1993-6) on inwardness and mind in Greek tragedy, In and Out of the Mind and Whom Gods Destroy, grew from her PhD, as a classicist interested in anthropology and psychology. I’m A Man (2000), building on this work, turned into a seven-year study of rock music through its images of masculinity and their debt to Greek myth.

Interests and Themes

MUSIC

Music is central to Ruth’s life. Her first job was playing viola in Westminster Abbey for £5. On Desert Island Discs her choices ranged from chamber music through Muddy Waters to popular Greek songs. She was brought up playing viola in family music: her father’s family were mainly musicians or doctors with a tradition of amateur chamber music. Her great great grandfather was a concert pianist in Leipzig who studied under a pupil of Beethoven and was a founder member of the York Symphony Orchestra.

Ruth is also a passionate singer. She sang in the Schola Cantorum Oxford, Philippe Caillard’s choir in Paris, the church choir of St Eustache in Les Halles, in the first performance of Handel’s Messiah in Greek with the Heraklion Town Choir, and in an Istanbul nightclub.

Her radio programmes include “Close Encounters,” interval talks on operas including Cosi Fan Tutte. Ariadne Auf Naxos, Tosca and La Traviata; a series of programmes on Elgar and W S Gilbert (as in Gilbert and Sullivan); and a radio essay on playing the viola. Her written essays on music include pieces on women in rock music and pre-performance talks at Glyndebourne; and articles on opera and sixteenth-century madrigals for The London Review of Books.

NATURE, SCIENCE, WILDLIFE AND CONSERVATION

Ruth has a keen interest in conservation. She is a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London, a Member of the Bombay Natural History Society and recently Writer in Residence at the Environment Institute, University College London. Tigers in Red Weather describes her three-year quest to understand wild tigers and tiger conservation through the forests of Asia. Her radio programmes include a series on the life and work of her great great grandfather Charles Darwin, and “Wild Things”, a series of talks on the biology and symbolism of British wild animals.

POETRY TEACHING
From 1998-2001 Ruth wrote an influential weekly column analysing a contemporary poem for The Independent on Sunday. She gathered and expanded these in her popular books 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem(2002) and The Poem and the Journey(2006). Silent Letters of the Alphabet , talks she gave at Newcastle University on writing poems, address technical matters like metaphor and tone.
Ruth’s broadcasting on poetry include programmes on Tennyson and contributions to programmes on the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. She has been Chair of the UK Poetry Society 2004-06 and done Poetry Residences at the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, Somerset House in London (where she ran a much-acclaimed series of Writers’ Talks at the Courtauld Gallery), and at Christ’s College Cambridge. Her teaching includes Arvon Foundation poetry courses, workshops as Writer in Residence for National Poetry Day on the South Bank, for Ledbury Poetry Festival, Poetry Proms; Somerset House, Christ’s College Cambridge and the Environment Institite, University College London. She also teaches regularly on a poetry course in south Crete.

In 2009 Ruth became the first woman to be elected Poetry Professor at Oxford. But a media storm arose when pages involving a rival candidate, describing sexual harassment cases on US campuses, were sent anonymously to Oxford dons. The other candidate withdrew and the press alleged that Ruth was behind it.
There was no evidence – Ruth had known nothing about it and said so. But allegations snowballed into something like a smear campaign against her. When she was elected, a poet-journalist published an email in which Ruth had mentioned that some students were angry that the harassment issue had been brushed under the carpet. Her email was hailed as evidence that she had smeared her rival. Ruth did not want to do the job under this cloud of allegation and resigned.

In 2010 she gave workshops and readings in the Slade College of Art and the Environment Institute, University College London and published her novel, Where the Serpent Lives, her Newcastle Poetry Lectures, Silent Letters of the Alphabet, and a ‘One-on-One’ selection of Walter Ralegh’s poems for Faber. In 2011 she gave the Housman Lecture at Hay on Wye Books Festival and began her Radio 4 series Poetry Workshop.

GREECE AND CRETE

Ruth has lived for many years off and on in Greece. Her love for Crete began when she was sent, as a student at the British School of Archaeology at Athens, to help excavate Minoan roads and tombs at Knossos. Since then she has taught modern and ancient Greek at Cambridge, in Oxford and on the spongedivers’ island of Kalymnos in the Dodecanese; and has taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton.

PUBLICATIONS

Ruth’s publications include poetry collections, books about poetry, non-fiction and a novel.

Poetry

Alibi, The Many Press, 1985
Summer Snow, Hutchinson 1990
Angel, Bloodaxe Books 1993 (PBS Recommendation)
Fusewire, Chatto & Windus 1996
Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Chatto & Windus 1998
(PBS Choice)
Voodoo Shop, Chatto & Windus, 2002 (PBS Recommendation)
The Soho Leopard, Chatto & Windus 2004 (PBS Choice)
Darwin: A Life in Poems, Chatto & Windus 2009
The Mara Crossing, Chatto & Windus 2012

Fiction

Where the Serpent Lives, Little, Brown 2010

Short Stories

Tigersex, Dublin Review May 2001
The Last Tiger, Prospect Magazine, September 2001
The Radar Angels, London Magazine 2002
We’re So Fab We Said All the Right Things, Hyphen: Short Stories
by Poets, ed. R. Page, Comma and Carcanet Press, 2003
You Make Me Feel Such A Hero, BBC Radio 4, June 2004

Non-Fiction: About Poetry

52 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A POEM, based on the column Ruth wrote for three years in the Independent on Sunday, introduces 52 contemporary poems and explained how and why poetry developed as it did in 80′s Britain, spearheaded by Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy.

THE POEM AND THE JOURNEY used the popular image of “the journey of life” to suggest ways of finding poetry valuable in modern lives; and also how to read a poem as a journey of thought, sound and image. The book discussed in depth poems by a wide range of British and American poets from popular and “mainstream” to modernist.

52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, Chatto 2002 (Vintage 2003)
Alfred Lord Tennyson: Poems with Introduction and Notes
by Ruth Padel, Folio Society 2006
The Poem and the Journey, Chatto & Windus 2007 (Vintage 2008)
Silent Letters of the Alphabet (Blooadaxe 2010)
Sir Walter Raleigh (Faber, 2010)

Other Non-Fiction

In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self,
Princeton University Press 1992
Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness,
Princeton University Press 1995
I’m A Man: Sex, Gods and Rock ‘n’ Roll, Faber & Faber 2000
Tigers in Red Weather, Little, Brown 2005 (Abacus 2006)

Bio