Agent

Patrick Walsh, Conville & Walsh, 2 Ganton St. London W1F 7QL

tel 0044 (0)287 3030     e - patrick@convilleandwalsh.com

                               PUBLICATIONS

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)

ABOUT POETRY

52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, Chatto & Windus 2002

Alfred Lord Tennyson: Poems with Introduction and Notes

                      by Ruth Padel, The Folio Society, 2006

The Poem and the Journey, Chatto & Windus 2007 (Vintage 2008)

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 essays and articles on classical scholarship began with "Imagery of the Elsewhere". You can find references to others in the bibliographies of IN AND OUT OF THE MIND and WHOM GODS DESTROY

FICTION

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

                                              LIFE

                                              In Brief

Ruth Padel was born in an attic in Wimpole Street. in London. Her first job was playing viola in Westminster Abbey for £5 and she is currently Poet in Residence at Somerset House, London. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and also the Zoological Society of London, a Member of the Bombay Natural History and Royal Geographical Societies. As Chair of the UK Poetry Society she oversaw radical change. She has won the National Poetry Competition and published six collections of poems. Four have been Poetry Book Society Choice or Recommendation, shortlisted for the T S Eliot and/or Whitbread Prizes.

     Ruth has taught ancient Greek at Oxford, opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton, myth in Buenos Aires University Psychology Department and horse-riding in Berlin. She has sung in the Heraklion Town Choir on Crete, an Istanbul nightclub and the choir of St Eustache, Paris, has helped to excavate Minoan roads and presented programmes on books and music for Radio 4 and 3.

    She lives freelance in London, from poetry readings, reviewing, writing and broadcasting, and tries to answer as few emails as possible. Her novel featuring king cobras will be published in 2009 and her main exercise is walking the dog.

                     In More Detail

Ruth studied Classics at Oxford, Paris and Berlin. At Oxford, she wrote a D. Phil. on the idea of the mind in Greek tragedy, was the first Bowra Fellow of Wadham College, Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Lecturer in Greek at Corpus Christi, Wadham and Merton Colleges, Oxford, Kings College Cambridge and Birkbeck College London.

   In 1985 she gave up academe 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."

    In 2005 she wrote and presented an acclaimed series of talks for BBC 4 on Hans Christian Anderson, analyzing each day a different tale and relating them to his life. In 2007 she wrote and presented a similar series on Elgar, looking at his life, relationships with women, love of landscape and personality through an exploration of the Enigma Variations.

Ruth is a great great grand-daughter of Charles Darwin. Between 2001 and 2004 she travelled through remote jungles and forests with foresters, scientists and conservationists in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, the Russian Far East, China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Sumatra, to discover what is happening to wild tigers and what hope there is for them today.

     She was brought up playing chamber music at home. 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. 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.

     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, in the first Cretan performance of Handel's Messiah (in Greek) by the Heraklion Town Choir, and also, by accident, in an Istanbul nightclub. Her music journalism and broadcasting include work in women in rock music, pre-performance talks at Glyndebourne, and "Close Encounters" - a series of interval talks on opera for BBC3. These include talks on 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 lived several years in Greece. She helped excavate Minoan roads and tombs in Crete, 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 of Freie Universität) horse-riding to wives of army officers in a Berlin barracks.

                              Work

       What people say about her 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 has published six books of non-fiction.

    Two are about reading contemporary poems. for a wide range of readers - from those who do not know poetry at all to the keen poetry-lover, professional poet and creative writing student.  

      52 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A POEM was based on the popular "reading poetry" column she wrote for three years in the Independent on Sunday. It introduced 52 contemporary poems and explained how and why poetry developed the way it did in 80's Britain.  THE POEM AND THE JOURNEY focuses on the image of the journey of our lives and suggests the secret of reading a poem is to see it as a journey. Itopens up ways of reading poems by a range of British and American poets, popular, mainstream and modernist.

    Ruth's non-fiction began with two ancient-Greek-focussed books for the general reader, published by Princeton University Press. These are loved and studied for their wide-ranging references, ancient and modern, and the passionate way she brings Greek thought to vivid life. Asking questions about mind, madness and ideas of the self in ancient Greece, she related Greek tragedy, poetry, religion and medicine to modern anthropology, psychoanalysis and psychology.

     I'M A MAN follows these, relating rock music, with its mythologies and masculinity, 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 to violence. Ian Rankin, in his thriller A Question of Blood, uses it as clue to the murderer's identity.

   TIGERS IN RED WEATHER, a travel-memoir about trekking through Asian junges to discover what is happening to wild tigers today, 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.

            What People Say About the Non-Fiction

"Not surprising her work took her, eventually, to the jungle," said an international scholar. "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."

"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