Publications, Biography, Reviews

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                                 BIOGRAPHY

        Ruth Padel is a prize-winning British poet who also writes acclaimed non-fiction, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, Bye-Fellow of Christ's College Cambridge. She has won the UK National Poetry Competition and poems from her seven collections have been widely anthologized, broadcast, and shortlisted for all major British prizes. Her first novel, Where the Serpent Lives, is published by Little Brown.
     Her awards include First Prize in the National Poetry Competition, a Cholmeley Award from the Society of Authors, an Arts Council of England Writers' Award. Her more public work includes Chairmanship of the Poetry Society 2004-6, a Poetry Residency at the Promenade Concerts, a Writer's Residency at Somerset House in London, where she ran a much-acclaimed series of Writers’ Talks at the Courtauld Gallery, and a Leverhulme Artist's residency at Christ's College Cambridge.

     Her non-fiction includes two books on mind and madness in Greek tragedy, I'm A Man, a study of rock music, Greek myth and masculinity, and two books about reading contemporary poetry, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey. These grew out of her popular "Sunday Poem" column which ran for three years in the Independent on Sunday. Her nature book, Tigers in Red Weather, about her quest through Asian jungles to find what is going on in tiger conservation, drew on her scientific background and Darwinian descent, and carried an appendix of poems related to her search.   

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Ruth was born in an attic in Wimpole Street, in London; her first job was playing viola in Westminster Abbey for £5. She has sung in the Heraklion Town Choir on Crete, an Istanbul nightclub and the choir of St Eustache in Paris; she has helped on Minoan excavations in Crete, where she helped to discover a road leading out of the palace of Knossos. She began as a classicist, studying Greek in Oxford, Berlin and Paris. From 1974-1984 she taught Greek, mainly in Oxford, but also at Birkbeck College London, Kings College Cambridge and Greece. researching several years in Crete where she lived by teaching English.  
     In 1984 she gave up academic tenure to write poetry. The Many Press published her first pamphlet of poems in 1985; in 1990 Hutchinson published her first full length collection, Summer Snow.  Since then she has published six more poetry collections and six works of non-fiction. (See also some of her essays and articles, in “Essays”). Her poems are published internationally in newspapers and magazines, most recently in The New Yorker, Poetry Review and London Review of Books.
     She broadcasts for Radio 3 and 4. She has written and presented a series of interval talks on opera called "Close Encounters", and many four-part Radio 4 series on the life and work of writers. scientists and composers, including Elgar Darwin and also Tennyson, whose work she inroduced in a Folio Society edition (see under BOOKS).
   Her poetry teaching includes Arvon Foundation residential poetry courses, , workshops as Writer in Residence for National Poetry Day on the South Bank, for Ledbury Poetry Festival, and for Poetry Proms, Royal Festival Hall. In 2008 she gave the Keynote Address for Dun Laoghaire International Poetry Festival and the Bloodaxe Lectures in Newcastle, which will be published in March 2010 as Silent Letters of the Alphabet,http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852248270

                                                In More Detail

Ruth studied Classics at Oxford, Paris and Berlin. At Oxford, she was the first Bowra Fellow of Wadham College, Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Lecturer in Greek at Corpus Christi, Wadham and Merton Colleges, Oxford. She was also Lecturer at Kings College Cambridge and Birkbeck College, London, and taught for two semesters in the Modern Greek department at Princeton.

   In 1985 she gave up tenure to write poems. Her first pamphlet, Alibi, was published that year by The Many Press. She now lives freelance in London, reviewing, broadcasting and writing. The BBC has commissioned several short stories; others have been published in Dublin Review and Prospect Magazine, and translated into German. "Totally compulsive reading," said one Prospect reader. "I read it on a bus journey and was oblivious to everything going on around me."

   From 2005 she has written and presented an acclaimed series of talks for BBC 4 on Hans Christian Anderson, Edward Elgar and her great great grand-father Charles Darwin: whose work began to influence hers when she travelled through Asian forests with scientists and conservationists researching tigers for her book TIGERS IN RED WEATHER.

        Music, as she explained on Desert Island Discs, is central to her life. Ruth was brought up playing viola in domestic chamber music. Her father's name, Padel, is Wendish. The Wends, or Sorbs, are a Slavic people in Upper and Lower Lusatia (South East Germany), which once stretched into modern Poland. The Wends are the last descendants of Slavic tribes in what became East Germany. Their leading 20th-century writer was Jurij Brezan, who died recently at the age of 89. The Padels were mainly musicians or physicians, with a tradition of family chamber music. Her great great grandfather was a concert pianist in Leipzig who studied under a pupil of Beethoven and became a founder member of the York Symphony Orchestra. Accordingly, Ruth has been Resident Poet at the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, sung in the Schola Cantorum Oxford, Philippe Caillard's choir in Paris, the church choir of St Eustache in Les Halles, the first performance of Handel's Messiah in Greek by the Heraklion Town Choir, and also in an Istanbul nightclub. Her music journalism and broadcasting include essays on women in rock music, pre-performance talks at Glyndebourne, and "Close Encounters" - a series of interval talks on opera for BBC3, including Cosi Fan Tutte. Ariadne Auf Naxos, Tosca and La Traviata. The Radio Times chose her personal choices "From the Archive" as Pick of the Week and described the feature as "dazzling".

      Ruth has lived for many years off and on in Greece. Her love for Crete began when, as a student at the British School of Archaeology at Athens, she was sent to help excavate Minoan roads and tombs at Knossos. Since then, she has taught modern and ancient Greek at Cambridge, Oxford, and on the spongedivers' island of Kalymnos in the Dodecanese. She has also taught myth in Buenos Aires University Psychology Department, opera in the Modern Greek Department of Princeton and - while studying in the Classics Dept at the Freie Universität - horse-riding to wives of army officers in a Berlin barracks.    

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

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

Ruth has published six books of non-fiction; probably the best known are two books on reading contemporary poems written for a wide range of readers: from people who do not know poetry at all to poetry-lovers, poets and students.

      52 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A POEM, based on the column she wrote for three years in the Independent on Sunday, introduced 52 contemporary poems and explained how and why poetry developed the way it did in 80's Britain.  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)

Walter Raleigh and his Circle (forthcoming from 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

  Ruth's first two prose books explored how ancient Greeks thought about the mind and madness, written for the general reader, scholars and students. Asking questions about mind, madness and ideas of the self in ancient Greek tragedy, Ruth related Greek tragedy, poetry, religion and medicine to anthropology, psychoanalysis, psychology. Ruth's essays and articles on classical scholarship began with "Imagery of the Elsewhere". References to others, are in bibliographies of IN AND OUT OF THE MIND and WHOM GODS DESTROY.

     I'M A MAN: SEX, GODS AND ROCK 'N' ROLL related the myths and masculinity of rock music to Greek heroes and Greek myth. It discusses opera, the origin of the blues, the Fifties invention of the teenager, and differences between American and British attitudes to nature and violence. Ian Rankin's thriller A Question of Blood makes this book a clue to the murderer's identity.

  More recently, TIGERS IN RED WEATHER was Ruth's travel-memoir about trekking through Asian junge, to discover what is happening to wild tigers today. It relates the imaginative and symbolic uses human beings have made of tigers to urgent moral questions of conservation in developing countries. It includes, at the back. a secret selection of poems by poets - from Donne and Keats to Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson - which Ruth took on her jungle travels.

   "Not surprising her work took her, eventually, to the jungle," said an international scholar who has followed her Greek work. "All her work, poetry or prose, is passionate about the physical reality of words and ideas. She seems driven to bring thought physically alive: to show how the mind is part of the body and the body part of the mind."                             

                                      REVIEWS

Poetry

"Passion, wit, music, texture and elegance", Paul Durcan

“Impressive, far-ranging focus” Observer

"Dazzling linguistic accomplishment”, Bernard O'Donoghue,

                                                                                                 Independent

"Poise, delicacy and technical venturesomeness, shining imagination and flights of exuberant imagery" Sunday Times

"A breakthrough: new styles, in Auden's phrase, of architecture"

                                                                                                Independent

“Inventiveness, deftly evoked scenarios, and skill in handling the speaking voice” Times Literary Supplement

“Soaring rhythms, assured technique, and gift for modulating from a conversational voice to a richlytextured singing line"

                                                                                  Sunday Telegraph

“She proves poetry can talk about difficult concepts in a linguistically interesting and complex way” Poetry London

"Approachable, contemporary, cool poems, magnificently varied, daring and imaginative, never short of glittering humour, and fabulously rich" What's On

"I love Ruth Padel's poetry. She is sexy, strong, rhythmic, passionate, fully alive and a whiz with words." Jeanette

                                                                                  Winterson, The Times

"Beautifully cadenced, popular and vibrant: the poems all but slink down the page, demanding to be read aloud. The glamour recalls Sex and the City: this alone would make her voice an original one"

                                                                               Independent on Sunday

NON-FICTION

"Ruth Padel combines two major gifts. She is a distinguished poet and a quite exceptional reader of the poetry of others, with a delightful skill in explanation and the instinct of a caring, clearsighted guide to how poetry works and why it matters."

                                                                                        George Steiner

"A wonderful writer” Evening Standard

"There are few women writing non-fiction today with such a sophisticated understanding of language, nuanced approach to style, and willingness to engage with the big issues, personal and political." Sara Wheeler, Guardian

"A poet and scholar with a beautifully patient understanding, reminiscent of Ted Hughes, of how the natural world invests itself in our experience." Andrew O'Hagan, Telegraph

"She has the linguistic gifts and imaginative drive to keep the reader caring, explaining the metaphysical as well as physical, scientific and political significance of her subject." Sunday Times

"An adventurer's intrepid spirit, a poet's eye for detail, and an ear for dialogue." Telegraph