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