Ruth Padel

Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, known for her poetic explorations of migration, both animal and human, and her involvement with classical music, wildlife conservation and Greece, ancient and modern.

From 1984 to 2000 she was married to philosopher Myles Burnyeat.

Her publishing career began in 1985, while she was teaching Greek at Birkbeck College, with a poetry pamphlet.

She then left academe to support herself by reviewing and publish her first collection (1990).

She was described as "the sexiest voice in British poetry" for her love poems in 1998; her elegiac poems explore loss and bereavement, Stylistic hallmarks are said to be juxtaposition of the modern world with the ancient, technical skill and musicality; wit, passion, lyrical intelligence, internal and half-rhyme, enjambement and unusual energy within and against the line, 'As if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in." Quoted influences include Gerard Manley Hopkins and Greek choral lyric. From 1998 to 2004, Padel's collections reflect themes of simultaneously written non-fiction: music (I’m a Man - Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll); technical attention to the poetic line (52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, exemplified in poems such as 'Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfrieshire' her National Poetry Competition winner); and wildlife (Tigers in Red Weather).

Padel's first novel Where the Serpent Lives(2010) focussed on nature, and also wildlife crime, mainly in India but also in Britain.

It was praised for its vivid nature writing, intensely observed portrait of Indian forests and wildlife under threat, her innovative use of science and animal's eye viewpoint.

'Only Emily Brontë has embraced Padel’s radical and sympathetic inclusiveness of creaturely life.' 'She brings a poet’s intensity to her prose: objects, plants, and the wildlife that stalk her pages are all fiercely observed.

Elephants and tigers under threat from poachers, forests felled for financial gain, corruption and uncaring officialdom result in habitats lost and species disappearing.' In India and UK, reviewers commented on the imaginative connections between nature, poetry and science.

"She has done for the forests of Karnataka and Bengal what Amitav Ghosh did for the Sundarbans in The Hungry Tide."

Her innovative poems-and-prose volume The Mara Crossing (2012) revivified the prosimetrum, a medieval mix of poetry and prose, It addresses animal and human migration.

and is described as a sweeping, experimental volume.

Migrants, cellular, animal or human, migrate to survive; human migration is inextricable from trade, invasion, colonization and empire.

"Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does "native" mean if the English Oak is an immigrant from Spain?"

She is Trustee for conservation charity New Networks for Nature, has served on the board of the Zoological Society of London and was Professor of Poetry at King's College London from 2013 to 2022.

Padel is daughter of psychoanalyst John Hunter Padel and Hilda Barlow, daughter of Sir Alan Barlow and Nora Barlow née Darwin, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, through whom Padel is Darwin's great-great-grandchild.

Her brother is historian Oliver Padel; cousins include prison reformer Una Padel, sculptor Phyllida Barlow, mathematician Martin T. Barlow and biographer Randal Keynes; her uncle is Horace Barlow.

Padel was born in Wimpole Street where her great-grandfather Sir Thomas Barlow practised medicine.

She attended North London Collegiate School, studied Classics at Lady Margaret Hall Oxford where she sang in Schola Cantorum of Oxford, wrote a PhD on Greek poetry, and as the first Bowra Research Fellow at Wadham College Oxford, which altered its Statutes for her to accommodate female Fellows,

was among the first women to become Fellows of formerly all-male Oxford colleges.

She taught Greek at Oxford and Birkbeck, University of London, taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton University, has lived extensively in Greece, and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she sang in the Choir of Église Saint-Eustache, Paris.

From 2014 to 2022 she was Professor of Poetry at King's College London.

Tidings - A Christmas Journey (2016) dedicated to the Focus Homeless Outreach Team in Camden, North London, is described as an eloquent unsentimental narrative poem exploring homelessness and the meanings of Christmas today."The rough, apparently unmanageable contrast between child and tramp, hope and despair, gives the book its integrity. Padel's 2014 collection Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth collects poems going back twelve years reflecting keen interest in the Middle East, from her prize-winning poem on Pieter Bruegel's "The Triumph of Death", the 2002 Siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, to the title poem "Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth", which she has stated came from hearing Le Trio Joubran. She has held dialogues with Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, and written an Introduction to the posthumous poems of Mahmoud Darwish.

Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth is said to have a 'magnificent central section on the Crucifixion,' and be steeped in the Middle East, Judaism, Christianity and Islam: "Padel is a poetic Daniel Barenboim, determined to arrive at some approximation of Middle Eastern harmony."

Emerald (2018), a memoir and meditation on the poet's mother at her death, explored the alchemy of mourning and the renewing value of green.

Her poetry biography of Beethoven, Beethoven Variations, was praised by the New York Times critic for taking him 'deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I’ve read, and her portrayal of Beethoven early on 'drifting into states that prefigured how deafness would increasingly isolate him.'

Her second novel, Daughters of the Labyrinth, set in London and Crete 2019-20, looks back to the Second World War and the little-known Holocaust of the Jews of Crete - where Padel has lived on and off since 1970.

It also tells the story of the last synagogue on Crete, Etz Hayyim Synagogue in Chania.

'It is rare to come across literary fiction as satisfying as this.

I had no idea there was a Jewish community on Crete or what had happened to them.

Padel skilfully shows the lives of Cretan Jews deeply embedded in the island’s life, and, tragically, how cut off they were from what was happening to Jews on the Greek mainland.

The whiff of authenticity seeps from every page,'(Jewish Chronicle).

‘An immersive novel steeped in the history and folklore of Crete: transporting, historically informative story-telling’(Sunday Times).

‘Evocative, entrancing, a wonderfully rich and absorbing novel, delightful in its evocation of Crete and its many-layered history.’

Padel has published twelve poetry collections, won the UK National Poetry Competition, and been shortlisted five times for the T S Eliot and other UK prizes.

Her major themes are music, science, nature, painting, history, migration and wildlife conservation; and her work takes the idea of "the journey" as a "stepping stone to lyrical reflection on the human condition".

She has been described as an exquisite image-maker of intense lyricism, delicate skill, rich imagery, deep resonance and a wild generous imagination.

Padel's collaboration with Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj, on Syrian refugees arriving on the Greek island of Lesbos, was performed on the first day of the Venice Biennale 2019.

Three later collections, Darwin - A Life in Poems and The Mara Crossing (now updated to We Are All From Somewhere Else 2020), include prose; Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth(2014), with its resonant last line, 'Making is our defence against the dark,' has been called a meditation on conflict and history: especially of the Abrahamic religions.

Tidings - A Christmas Journey addressed homelessness in her local London borough.