Ruth Padel is an award-winning British poet, novelist and non-fiction writer, with close links to Greece, India, classical music, nature, science and wildlife conservation.

Image: Giliola Christe

Recent books

To contact Ruth, you can email her agent Robert Kirby: RKirby@unitedagents.co.uk

Watch more readings from Beethoven Variations here.

Praise for Ruth Padel

“Daring and genuinely innovative work: a unique sense of drama, speed and poetic intensity.”
Guardian

“An immensely moving, beautifully written exploration of the beauty, suffering, and imaginative potency of migration, an opportunity to have one’s mind fired up by, a witty, wonderful intellect plumbing the phenomenon of migration and its intellectual, ethical, historical, political and aesthetic implications.”
Poetry London

“A prodigy, a book of wonders… sheerly brilliant.”
Independent

“Sweeping and unconventional – her poems and essays are a lyrical tribute to the instincts and whims, trials and beauties that catalyse movement.”
Economist

‘Extraordinary breadth of erudition, sensitivity to different cultural environments and powerful visual alertness: readers will be struck by the mature command of these poems as well as their great range of subject and feeling.’
Rowan Williams

“A poet and scholar with a beautifully patient understanding, reminiscent of Ted Hughes, of how the natural word invests itself in our experience.”
Telegraph

‘Magnificent poems… A triumph of artistic ingenuity.’
Guardian

‘In her work, the journey is the stepping stone to lyrical reflections on the human condition.’
— André Naffis-Sahely

“I wanted to explore the hold of the past on the present, and the uncertainty we all have about what lies beneath the surface of your life.”
Ruth Padel on Daughters of the Labyrinth

Author images on this page, credit: Donna Ford