Ruth Padel

Life

She studied Greek at the University of Oxford, where she sang in Schola Cantorum of Oxford, wrote a PhD thesis on ancient Greek poetry, and was a research fellow at Wadham College, which altered its statutes for her to allow female fellows. She taught Greek at Oxford, Cambridge and Birkbeck College, University of London, taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton University, and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she sang in the Choir of Église Saint-Eustache, and at the British School of Archaeology at Athens, for which she helped excavate the Royal Road at Knossos. In 1984, she left academia to write, and published a poetry pamphlet and first collection.

She has served as trustee for Zoological Society of London and conservation charity New Networks for Nature, Chair of UK Poetry Society and Professor of Poetry, King's College London

Family

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

Work

Poetry

Padel has published thirteen poetry collections, won the UK National Poetry Competition, and been shortlisted five times for the T. S. Eliot Prize and other UK prizes. Major themes are music, science, nature and wildlife, painting, history, migration (animal and human), and women's place in the world, most recently exploring myths woven around girls, the links between girlhood and nature, and the misogyny girls face. Her work often focuses on the journey as a "stepping stone to lyrical reflection on the human condition". Padel's 1996 to 2004 collections, mixed passionate love lyric with wide adventuring across the globe, but also challenged the supremacy of the male gaze at women and offered the female gaze instead. Described as an exquisite image-maker and love poet of intense lyricism, delicate skill, deep resonance and a wild generous imagination, she went on to elegiac poems exploring loss and bereavement. A meditation on the colour green, written after her mother's death, "guides us around the world in intense flights of geological and geographical fancy, excavating the truths and mysteries of grief". 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). 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. 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." Girl (2024) is "A sensual exploration of female archetypes" and "a spiritual quest through ancient mythology, mysticism, European fairytales and memory" that reminds us "there is always the question of power / and girl is a trajectory / of learning how to deal with it".

Non-fiction

Padel's non-fiction began with Princeton University Press studies of ancient Greek drama and the mind. In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self explores the way Greek ideas of inwardness shaped European notions of the self. She used anthropology and psychoanalysis to support her thesis that male Greek culture spoke of the mind as mainly "female" and receptive rather than "male" and active. Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Madness in Greek and Other Tragedy investigates madness in tragedy from the Greeks to Shakespeare and the moderns, parsing different views of madness in different societies. She presented the tragic hero as embodiment of the human mind, "which lives catastrophe, suffers damage and endures".

Her 2000 study I'm A Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll argued that rock music began as a "wishing well of masculinity", which drew on mythic connections between male sexuality, aggression, anxiety, misogyny and violence which derived from Ancient Greece. Padel has stated that she intended this to focus on women's voices but then felt she ought first to pick apart the maleness of rock music. The book had a mixed reception from male reviewers. Women reviewers described it as original, beautifully expressed, vivid, amusing and convincing; Rock writers Charles Shaar Murray and Casper Llewellyn Smith described it as "provocative and fascinating" and her analysis of rock's misogyny "dazzling".

Padel is known for her poetry and prose on conservation, especially of tigers. While serving as Trustee for the Zoological Society of London, she inaugurated an influential programme of ZSL Writers' Talks on Endangered Species to highlight the Zoological Society of London's conservation work. and is an Ambassador for New Networks for Nature, an alliance of practitioners in different fields, artistic and scientific, who celebrate Britain's nature and wildlife.

Her account of wild tiger conservation, drawing on her scientific background and Darwinian descent, was valued internationally for quality of nature writing, insights on conservation, travel writing on little-known parts of the world such as Sumatra, Bhutan and Ussuriland, her ear for dialogue. and portrait of both the tiger and the field-zoologist. More recently, she has recorded "24 Splashes of Denial" – poems on water and climate denial - for Writers Rebel, and "Hormones, Divinity and Forest", her 2021 Memorial Lecture for Jane Harrison for Newnham College, Cambridge, united her early classical scholarship with contemporary environmental anxiety about the crisis in nature.

Fiction

Padel's first novel Where the Serpent Lives (2010) focuses 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 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.’

Criticism and teaching

From 1998 to 2001, she pioneered "The Sunday Poem", a weekly column in London's Independent on Sunday, in readings of contemporary poems she collected in her popular books 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey. As Chair of the UK Poetry Society 2004–2007, she presided over the establishment of poetry "Stanzas" across the UK.

In 2010, she chaired Judges for the Forward Poetry Prize, in 2011 delivered the Housman Lecture at the Hay Festival on "The Name and Nature of Poetry", and inaugurated Radio 4's Poetry Workshop, a series of programmes on writing poetry in which she led workshops with poetry groups across the UK.

Her books on reading poetry and the column from which they grew influenced a decade of writing about poetry in the UK, followed by her Newcastle University "Bloodaxe" Lectures on poetry's use of silence, Silent Letters of the Alphabet. Her criticism is reported to employ close analysis, knowledge of Greek poetics, myth, metaphor, tone and rhyme; she is said to read with aural acuity, generosity and no polemic; her precision "does not obscure but builds the big picture", addressing the general reader but with "utmost attention to the page".

She has written introductions to the works of Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti and Ramsey Nasr, and British poets Walter Ralegh, Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

At the opening festival of the T. S. Eliot Festival at Little Gidding in 2006, 70 years after Eliot's visit there, Padel described the contrast between Eliot's memories of Little Gidding and his experience of The Blitz while writing the poem. "It reminded him there was still a place that had a sense of truth." She returned to this moment in her foreword to the posthumous volume of Mahmoud Darwish, comparing his sense of the poet's role in a time of violence to that of Seamus Heaney in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and of Eliot during the London blitz.

Books

Fiction

Where the Serpent Lives 2010

Daughters of the Labyrinth 2021

Poetry

Alibi, The Many Press, 1985

Summer Snow, Hutchinson, 1990

Angel, Bloodaxe Books 1993

Fusewire, Chatto & Windus, 1996

Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Shortlisted for T. S. Eliot Prize, Chatto & Windus, 1998

Voodoo Shop, Shortlisted for Whitbread Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize, Chatto & Windus, 2002

The Soho Leopard, Shortlisted for T. S. Eliot Prize, Chatto & Windus, 2004

Darwin – A Life in Poems, Shortlisted for Costa Prize, Chatto & Windus, A A Knopf, 2009

The Mara Crossing, Shortlisted for Ted Hughes Award, Chatto & Windus, 2012

Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth, Shortlisted for T. S. Eliot Prize, Chatto & Windus, 2014

Tidings – A Christmas Journey Chatto & Windus, 2016

Emerald, Chatto & Windus, 2018

Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life, Chatto & Windus and A. A. Knopf, 2020

We Are All from Somewhere Else (updated edition of The Mara Crossing) Vintage, 2020

Watershed - poems on water and climate denial, Hazel Press, 2023

Girl, Chatto & Windus, 2024, Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

Non-fiction

In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1992

Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness, 1995

I'm a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll, 2000

Tigers in Red Weather, 2005

Criticism, and editing

52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: How Reading Modern Poetry Can Change Your Life, 2002

The Poem and the Journey, 2006

Silent Letters of the Alphabet, 2010

Walter Ralegh, Selected Poems, 2010

Alfred Lord Tennyson (Folio Society, Introduction and Notes), 2007

Gerard Manley Hopkins (Folio Society, Introduction), 2011

Awards and appointments

1992: Wingate Scholarship

1993: Angel Poetry Book Society Recommendation

1994: Arts Council Writers' Award for poetry collection Fusewire

1996: First Prize, UK National Poetry Competition

1996: Judge for T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize

1998: Rembrandt Would Have Loved You Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for T. S. Eliot Prize

1998: Appointed Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature

1999: Judge for National Poetry Competition

2000: Cholmondeley Award from Society of Authors

2002: Poet in Residence for the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts in 2002.

2002: Voodoo Shop Poetry Book Society Recommendation, short-listed for T. S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award

2003 Research Award from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

2004: The Soho Leopard Poetry Book Society Choice, short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize

2005: Tigers in Red Weather shortlisted in USA for Kiriyama Prize and in UK for Dolman Best Travel Book Award

2005: Judge for Royal Society Aventis Prize for Science Books

Oxford Professor of Poetry

In 2009, Padel became the first woman to be elected Oxford Professor of Poetry but a media storm broke out when photocopied pages from a university publication, detailing sexual harassment charges at Harvard and Boston universities against rival Derek Walcott, were sent anonymously to Oxford voters. Walcott withdrew his candidacy. Padel denied connection with these pages but media commentators alleged her involvement; she resigned, saying she did not wish to do the job under suspicion. Public comment attributed treatment of Padel to misogyny, and "toxic media pursuing allegations against Walcott while denigrating Padel, justly held in high regard for her poetry and teaching, for mentioning these as a source of disquiet" and pointing out that she had mentioned information in the public domain, not rumours. "Oxford missed out for the worst of reasons on an inspirational teacher; Walcott removed the decision from the electorate by his own choice; Padel should not have been made to pay for his decision to confront neither his accusers nor his past." On Newsnight Review, poet Simon Armitage, elected to the Chair in 2016, expressed regret at her resignation: "Ruth's a good person. I don't think she should have resigned; she would have been good."