Ruth Padel is a writer of unusual range. She has close personal links to Greece, India, classical music, nature, wildlife conservation and science, but is first and foremost an award-winning poet. Her books include thirteen acclaimed poetry collections, two novels, and a wide sweep of non-fiction. She lives in London, is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, and currently Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Magdalene College Cambridge.
Image: Giliola Christe
To contact Ruth, please email her agent Philip Gwyn Jones at Greyhound Literary.
“A rhapsodic work: a sensual exploration of female archetypes, and a spiritual quest through ancient mythology, mysticism, fairy-tale, memory. The wonder of being a girl... where a girl / can find clarity on who she is”, vs “the question of power: / and girl is a trajectory / of learning how to deal with it”. — The Guardian
Girl
Chatto & Windus
Poetry Book Society
Special Commendation
Out 7 November 2024
To hear Ruth's 'Mystery' poems for Mary, at the beginning of Girl, WATCH her read on Palm Sunday at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, interspersed with some of the Bach Cello Suites.
Recent books
“One of our most gifted poets”
— Mona Arshi
“How seamlessly she melds the realms of feeling with the realms of thought”
— Linda Gregerson
‘Dazzling control of the lyric line’
— Kim Moore
‘A poet and scholar with a beautifully patient understanding, reminiscent of Ted Hughes, of how the natural word invests itself in our experience’
— Telegraph
‘In her work, the journey is the stepping stone to lyrical reflections on the human condition’
— André Naffis-Sahely
‘Only Emily Brontë has embraced Padel’s radical and sympathetic inclusiveness of creaturely life’
— Guardian
‘She brings a poet’s intensity to her prose. Nature is her forte and in the wild she sings her best song’ — Spectator
‘A nature lover’s delight… compelling, acute, lyrical, readable’
— India Today
‘Evocative, entrancing, wonderfully rich and absorbing, She tells a compelling story while deepening understanding of the complexity of our own nature’
— The Scotsman
‘Precise and contemporary, a very present Britain and an ever-present past, transformed by a beautiful imagination. Magical and historical, surprising, elegant, and beautifully written’
— Andrew O’Hagan
Watershed
Sir Walter Ralegh, poems selected by Ruth Padel
Silent Letters of the Alphabet
The Poem and the Journey
52 Ways of Looking at a Poem
I'm a Man
Whom Gods Destroy
In and Out of the Mind
Where the Serpent Lives
Daughters of the Labyrinth
Alibi
Summer Snow
Angel
Fusewire
Rembrandt Would Have Loved You
Voodoo Shop
The Soho Leopard
Tidings
Emerald
Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth
The Mara Crossing
Beethoven Variations
we are all from somewhere else
