Professor Ruth Padel

Professor Ruth Padel is the Royal Literary Fellow at Magdalene.

Professor Padel is an award-winning poet, author and conservationist with close links to Greece, India, music, wildlife and Charles Darwin. Her new poetry collection Girl (Chatto & Windus) November 2024, is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

Ruth Padel was born in London, but has close links to Greece. She has won the National Poetry Competition and her collections have been shortlisted for all major UK poetry Prizes. Her novel Daughters of the Labyrinth, shortlisted for the Runciman and Anglo-Hellenic Prizes, tells the story of the Holocaust on Crete, where she has lived on and off for many years. Her thirteen poetry collections, shortlisted for all major UK prizes, include Beethoven Variations (“She tells the great composer’s life story more profoundly than most biographies”, New York Times) and We Are All from Somewhere Else, a prose-and-poetry work on animal and human migration. Darwin: A Life in Poems was an innovative biography in poems of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin.

Her first novel Where the Serpent Lives was on wildlife conservation in India. Her non-fiction ranges from tiger conservation to the influence of Greek myth on rock music, and reading contemporary poetry. Her poems have appeared in New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She has served as Chair of Judges for the T. S. Eliot and Forward Poetry Prizes, and as Judge for the International Man Booker Prize and Wellcome Trust Science Book Prize. Awards include First Prize in the National Poetry Competition, a British Council Darwin Now Award, and a Cholmondley Prize from the Society of Authors.

She is Fellow of the Zoological Society of London and Royal Society of Literature. She has lived in Oxford, Cambridge and for many years off and on in Greece, but now lives again in London. From 2013 to 2022, after thirty years as a freelance writer , journalist and broadcaster, she was Professor of Poetry at King’s College London, in the Creative Writing Centre of the English Department.

She is one of the seventy-two great-great-grandchildren of Charles Darwin, read Classics at Oxford, wrote a D.Phil. on Greek tragedy and ideas of the mind, studying for this on a scholarship at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Sorbonne, and The British School of Archaeology at Athens. From 1975, she taught ancient Greek at Oxford, Cambridge, Birkbeck College, London.  She also lived in Crete, writing up her thesis and teaching English.

In 1984, she gave up tenure to write, supporting the writing by journalism, broadcasting and teaching. From 1998 to 2001 she wrote The Sunday Poem, a weekly column on reading poems for the Independent on Sunday. In 2001 she began wildlife research for Tigers in Red Weather and her first novel Where the Serpent Lives, visiting tiger forests across Asia and the world’s only king cobra reserve in South India. Since then, she has travelled extensively in India, where she enjoys collaborating with both poetry and conservation colleagues, and doing poetry readings. In 2018, she began a new line of conservation research on elephants in Tamil Nadu.

Ruth was First Resident Writer at Somerset House, 2008-9, where she inaugurated and curated a series of Writers’ Talks on paintings in the Courtauld Gallery, beginning with Philip Pullman on Renoir and Colm Tóibín on Cézanne, doing a talk herself on Bruegel’s ‘Flight into Egypt’; and first Writer in Residence at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 2014. As Trustee of the Zoological Society of London, 2010-2013, she chaired a series of Writers’ Talks on endangered wild animals, pairing writers with keepers, scientists, conservationists and specific wild animals: Mark Haddon with the Galapagos tortoise, Andrew Motion with sea horses, and contributing one herself on hummingbirds.

Research Interests

• Greek literature and language (ancient and modern)
• Classical music
• Poetry (ancient and modern, across all languages)
• Wildlife conservation, with a focus on Asia and the UK
• Zoology
• Genetics (see work on Music from the Genome)
• Painting, sculpture, and music (see LRB articles on:
  • Women's voices in opera
  • Singing a 16th-century madrigal
  • Research for a verse biography of Beethoven

Qualifications

• MA
• DPhil (Oxon)

Career/Research Highlights

• Inaugurating 2018 Jaipur Literature Festival reading my poem ‘Emerald’
• Performing my sequences on the Passion with string quartet recitals of Haydn’s Seven Last Words in New York, London, Worcester College Oxford, Trinity College Cambridge, Little Gidding and elsewhere (in 2026 at the Wigmore Hall)
• My sequence on the Mysteries of the Rosary with a baroque ensemble playing Biber’s Rosary Sonatas at 2023 West Cork Chamber Music Festival

Professional Affiliations

• The Poetry Society (Chair 2004-7)
• PΕΝ
• Society of Authors
• Royal Society of Literature
• Zoological Society of London (Trustee 2011-2015)