Publications, Biography, Agent

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ABOUT RUTH

Ruth Padel is a prize-winning British poet and writer. This year she is publishing three books: her first novel, Where the Serpent Lives, three poetry lectures, Silent Letters of the Alphabet, and an introduction to the poems of Walter Ralegh. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, a Member of Bombay Natural History Society and a Bye-Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. Her poems have been widely anthologized and broadcast and her poetry collections have been shortlisted for all major British prizes. Ruth's awards include First Prize in the National Poetry Competition, a Cholmeley Award from the Society of Authors, an Arts Council of England Writers' Award and a British Council Darwin Now Research Award.

Ruth's non-fiction includes two books on ancient Greek tragedy which grew out of her academic work at Oxford, and I'm A Man, a study of rock music, Greek myth and masculinity. Her eco-travel book Tigers in Red Weather drew on her Darwinian background in a quest through forests all over Asia to understand wild tigers and modern tiger conservation. She has written several much-loved books about reading contemporary poetry. 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey grew out of a highly popular "Sunday Poem" column, which Ruth wrote for three years in the Independent on Sunday. Her new book Silent Letters of the Alphabet develops the 's Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures she gave in Newcastle in May 2008.   

Ruth's more public work includes Chair of the Poetry Society 2004-06, a Poetry Residency at the Promenade Concerts, a Writer's Residency at Somerset House in London, where she ran a much-acclaimed series of Writers’ Talks at the Courtauld Gallery, and a Leverhulme Artist's Residency at Christ's College Cambridge. Among Ruth's broadcasts for Radio 3 and 4 are interval talks on opera, and programmes on the life and work of writers, scientists and composers including Elgar, Darwin, Hans Andersen, Tennyson and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Her poetry teaching includes Arvon Foundation poetry courses, workshops as Writer in Residence for National Poetry Day on the South Bank, for Ledbury Poetry Festival and for Poetry Proms; for Somerset House and at Christ's College Cambridge. She teaches regularly on a poetry course in south Crete. In 2008 she gave the Bloodaxe Lectures at Newcastle and the Keynote Address for Dun Laoghaire International Poetry Festival, and in 2010 the Keynote address at the Kate O'Brien Conference in Limerick.

In May 2009, Ruth was elected first woman Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. The election was dominated by a media storm caused by anonymous dossiers sent to some Oxford dons, of pages from a book describing court cases of sexual harassment involving a rival candidate who withdrew when the media storm began. After Ruth's election a poet who had contacted Ruth, before the election, claiming she was writing about poetry at Oxford, and an Arts journalist who had asked Ruth for information about opinion at Oxford, published Ruth's email responses to them a month before, in which Ruth mentioned students' anger that the harassment issue was being ignored. These emails had not resulted in any newspaper article, and Ruth had done nothing to make the other candidate withdraw. But Ruth felt she could not do the job properly under media pressure connecting her emails with the anonymous dossiers, and alleging her involvement in a smear campaign against her rival in which she had no part. Ruth decided to resign.

Ruth is currently writing a mixed prose-and-poetry book on migration and immigration funded by an Arts Coucil of England Individual Award for the Arts, and collaborating with composer Michael Zev Gordon on a choral work, Music from the Genome commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, which explores in words, music and science the possiblity of a "gene for" musicality.

                                        ~~~~~ LIFE ~~~~~

Ruth was born in an attic in Wimpole Street in London and her first job was playing viola in Westminster Abbey for £5. She has sung in the Heraklion Town Choir on Crete, an Istanbul nightclub and the choir of St Eustache in Paris; she has helped on Minoan excavations in Crete, where she helped to discover a road leading out of the palace of Knossos. She began as a classicist, studying Greek in Oxford, Berlin and Paris. From 1974-1984 she taught Greek, mainly in Oxford, where she was the first Bowra Fellow of Wadham College, Research Fellow at Wolfson, and Lecturer in Greek at Corpus Christi, Wadham and Merton Colleges. She was also a Lecturer in Greek at Kings College Cambridge and Birkbeck College London, taught two semesters in the Modern Greek department at Princeton and researched for several years in Crete where she lived by teaching English.  

In 1984 she gave up academic tenure to write. The Many Press published her first pamphlet of poems in 1985; in 1990 Hutchinson published her first full length collection, Summer Snow.  Since then she has published seven more poetry collections and seven works of non-fiction. (See also essays and articles in “Essays”). Her poems are published internationally in newspapers and magazines, most recently in The New Yorker, Poetry Review and London Review of Books.

Music, she said on Desert Island Discs, is central to her life. Ruth was brought up playing viola in family chamber music. Her father's name, Padel, is Wendish. The Wends, or Sorbs, are a Slavic people in Upper and Lower Lusatia (South East Germany), which once stretched into modern Poland. The Wends are the last descendants of Slavic tribes in what became East Germany. Their leading 20th-century writer was Jurij Brezan, who died recently at the age of 89. The Padels were mainly musicians or physicians, with a tradition of family chamber music. Her great great grandfather was a concert pianist in Leipzig who studied under a pupil of Beethoven and became a founder member of the York Symphony Orchestra. 

Ruth has sung in the Schola Cantorum Oxford, Philippe Caillard's choir in Paris, the church choir of St Eustache in Les Halles, the first performance of Handel's Messiah in Greek by the Heraklion Town Choir, and in an Istanbul nightclub. Her music journalism and broadcasting include essays on women in rock music, pre-performance talks at Glyndebourne, and "Close Encounters" - a series of interval talks on opera for BBC3, including Cosi Fan Tutte. Ariadne Auf Naxos, Tosca and La Traviata. The Radio Times chose her personal choices "From the Archive" as Pick of the Week and described the feature as "dazzling".

 Ruth has lived for many years off and on in Greece. Her love for Crete began when, as a student at the British School of Archaeology at Athens, she was sent to help excavate Minoan roads and tombs at Knossos. Since then, she has taught modern and ancient Greek at Cambridge, Oxford, and on the spongedivers' island of Kalymnos in the Dodecanese. She has also taught myth in Buenos Aires University Psychology Department, opera in the Modern Greek Department of Princeton and - while studying in the Classics Dept at the Freie Universität - horse-riding to wives of army officers in a Berlin barracks.    

Ruth's Publications include poetry collections, books about poetry, non-fiction and a novel.

POETRY

Alibi, The Many Press, 1985

Summer Snow, Hutchinson 1990

Angel, Bloodaxe Books 1993 (PBS Recommendation)

Fusewire, Chatto & Windus 1996

Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Chatto & Windus 1998

                                          (PBS Choice)

Voodoo Shop, Chatto & Windus, 2002 (PBS Recommendation)

The Soho Leopard, Chatto & Windus 2004 (PBS Choice)

Darwin: A Life in Poems, Chatto & Windus 2009

FICTION

Where the Serpent Lives, Little, Brown 2010

SHORT STORIES

Tigersex, Dublin Review May 2001

The Last Tiger, Prospect Magazine, September 2001

The Radar Angels, London Magazine 2002

We're So Fab We Said All the Right Things, Hyphen: Short Stories

   by Poets, ed. R. Page, Comma and Carcanet Press, 2003

You Make Me Feel Such A Hero, BBC Radio 4, June 2004

NON-FICTION: ABOUT POETRY

Ruth has published six books of non-fiction; probably the best known are two books on reading contemporary poems written for a wide range of readers: from people who do not know poetry at all to poetry-lovers, poets and students.

52 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A POEM, based on the column she wrote for three years in the Independent on Sunday, introduced 52 contemporary poems and explained how and why poetry developed the way it did in 80's Britain. 

THE POEM AND THE JOURNEY used the popular image of "the journey of life" to suggest ways of finding poetry valuable in modern lives; and also how to read a poem as a journey of thought, sound and image. The book discussed in depth poems by a wide range of British and American poets from popular and "mainstream" to modernist.

52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, Chatto 2002 (Vintage 2003)

Alfred Lord Tennyson: Poems with Introduction and Notes

                      by Ruth Padel, Folio Society 2006

The Poem and the Journey, Chatto & Windus 2007 (Vintage 2008)

Silent Letters of the Alphabet (Blooadaxe 2010)

Sir Walter Raleigh (Faber, 2010)

OTHER NON-FICTION

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

        Princeton University Press 1992

Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness,

         Princeton University Press 1995

I'm A Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll, Faber & Faber 2000

  Ruth's first two prose books explored how ancient Greeks thought about the mind and madness, written for the general reader, scholars and students. Asking questions about mind, madness and ideas of the self in ancient Greek tragedy, Ruth related Greek tragedy, poetry, religion and medicine to anthropology, psychoanalysis, psychology. Ruth's essays and articles on classical scholarship began with "Imagery of the Elsewhere". References to others, are in bibliographies of IN AND OUT OF THE MIND and WHOM GODS DESTROY.

     I'M A MAN: SEX, GODS AND ROCK 'N' ROLL relates the myths and masculinity of rock music to Greek heroes and Greek myth. It discusses opera, the origin of the blues, the Fifties invention of the teenager, and differences between American and British attitudes to nature and violence. Ian Rankin's thriller A Question of Blood makes this book a clue to the murderer's identity.

 TIGERS IN RED WEATHER relates the imaginative and symbolic uses human beings have made of tigers to questions of conservation in developing countries. "Not surprising her work took her, eventually, to the jungle," says an international scholar who has followed her Greek work. "All her work, poetry or prose, is passionate about the physical reality of words and ideas. She seems driven to bring thought physically alive: to show how the mind is part of the body and the body part of the mind."                             

                                      REVIEWS

Poetry

"Passion, wit, music, texture and elegance", Paul Durcan

“Impressive, far-ranging focus” Observer

"Dazzling linguistic accomplishment”, Bernard O'Donoghue,

                                                                                                 Independent

"Poise, delicacy and technical venturesomeness, shining imagination and flights of exuberant imagery" Sunday Times

"A breakthrough: new styles, in Auden's phrase, of architecture"

                                                                                                Independent

“Inventiveness, deftly evoked scenarios, and skill in handling the speaking voice” Times Literary Supplement

“Soaring rhythms, assured technique, and gift for modulating from a conversational voice to a richlytextured singing line" Sunday Telegraph

“She proves poetry can talk about difficult concepts in a linguistically interesting and complex way” Poetry London

"Approachable, contemporary, cool poems, magnificently varied, daring and imaginative, never short of glittering humour, and fabulously rich" What's On

"I love Ruth Padel's poetry. She is sexy, strong, rhythmic, passionate, fully alive and a whiz with words." Jeanette Winterson, Times

"Beautifully cadenced, popular and vibrant: the poems all but slink down the page, demanding to be read aloud. The glamour recalls Sex and the City: this alone would make her voice an original one" Independent on Sunday

NON-FICTION

"Ruth Padel combines two major gifts. She is a distinguished poet and a quite exceptional reader of the poetry of others, with a delightful skill in explanation and the instinct of a caring, clearsighted guide to how poetry works and why it matters." George Steiner

"A wonderful writer” Evening Standard

"There are few women writing non-fiction today with such a sophisticated understanding of language, nuanced approach to style, and willingness to engage with the big issues, personal and political." Guardian

"A poet and scholar with a beautifully patient understanding, reminiscent of Ted Hughes, of how the natural world invests itself in our experience." Andrew O'Hagan, Telegraph

"She has the linguistic gifts and imaginative drive to keep the reader caring, explaining the metaphysical as well as physical, scientific and political significance of her subject." Sunday Times

"An adventurer's intrepid spirit, a poet's eye for detail, and an ear for dialogue." Telegraph