Listen
Ruth with A. E. Stallings, Rachel Hadas and Alberto Manguel before a poetry reading at 92 St Y, New York 2019
Listen to composer Vic Sharma’s 2023 setting of Twenty-Four Splashes of Denial on YouTube, Apple or Spotify. Listen to Twenty-Four Splashes of Denial, Ruth’s poetry sequence on water and climate denial, recorded on her phone for Writers Rebel, July 2020.
Listen to Ruth reading Beethoven poems, and talking about Beethoven’s life, at the opening session of the AUD Indelible Festival of Literature, Dubai, March 14th 2021
Hear Ruth read her poem Nightsinging in a Time of Plague, a response to Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, on the Bicentenary of Keats’ death, February 23rd 2021.
A reading from Beethoven Variations, and discussion with poet Suhit Kelkat in Mumbai, for PEN@Prithvi, February 6th 2021
July 2020: for Extinction Rebellion and XR Writers Rebel, Ruth reads a new sequence on water and climate change, ‘Twenty-Four Splashes of Denial’
July 2020, Bangalore International Centre: Ruth reads poems through Beethoven’s life, illustrated by musicians.
Part 3 ‘The Essence of Romanticism’: Anguish in a Time of War
Part 4 ‘The Immortal Beloved: Despair – and his Astonishing Late Style’
Podcast of Beethoven event, 2020, London Review Bookshop: Ruth with poets Anthony Anaxagorou and Ray Antrobus
November 2019, Ruth reads ‘Your Life as a Wave’, her poem in response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60, in the British Council Pakistan garden in Lahore.
Poetry Reading at 92Y Poetry Center, New York, 2019
Two poems (after speeches) at Inaugural Session of 2019 Jaipur Literary Festival.
Performance at Jaipur Festival 2019 with Ben Okri, Kaveh Akbar, Tishani Doshi and Zeina Beck, introduced by William Sieghart
Poetry Hour Jaipur 2019, with Kaveh Akbar, Akhil Katyal, Anupama Raju, Devesh Alakh and Makarand R. Paranjape, moderated by Satyajit Sarna
2019 Ruth talking about her life with radio presenter Gideon Coe, for Postcards from the Past
2017 talking about Charles Darwin at Heraklion Natural History Museum, Crete (mostly in Greek)
2016 First reading from Tidings, Serpentine Gallery, London
2016 Meet the Writer, radio interview with Monocle Magazine
January 2015 ‘We break the line to shape it.’ Reading from Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth in the 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize readings, introduced by Ian Macmillan: ‘She shows how in agony and redemption we reach for language, moving towards that fantastic last line; ‘Making is our defence against the dark.’
2015 Talking about Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth, in Venice
2014 Talking about her crucifixion poems (from Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth) and the Seven Last Words by Josef Haydn, with cellist David Waterman of the Endellion Quartet
2014 Reading ‘To Speak of Distance’ (from Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth) commissioned for Nowhere Island
2013 Reading ‘Time to Fly’ for New Networks for Nature.
2012 Talking about science and poetry with philosopher Mary Midgeley
2009 In conversation at Cambridge Darwin Festival 2009
‘Indian Princess Picks Lover Out from Gods’, Poetry Archive 1998
Poems for The Poetry Archive, 1998
Ruth’s poem ‘The Cello’, read on Poetry Monday
Photo by Mark Gerson, National Portrait Gallery, London
Talking about her novel on the Cretan Holocaust, Daughters of the Labyrinth, in Crete's last remaining synagogue, Etz Hayyim, in Chania, where the book is set, October 2022
Reading 'Little Gidding' outside Little Gidding Church, T. S .Eliot Festival July 2023
Radio
'This is the vowel of earth': Ruth's John Coffin Memorial Lecture on Irish Studies, on Seamus Heaney, London 2019
Ruth contributed to a wide range of programmes for BBC Radio 3 and 4 from 2000 to 2015.
In 2014, she wrote and read a radio essay for Minds at War, about the memorial ‘The Grieving Parents’ by German artist Kathe Kollwitz.
In 2011 and 2012 she presented a Radio 4 series Poetry Workshop, for which she travelled the UK leading poetry workshops on air, discussing participants’ poems with groups in Exeter, the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, Ipswich, Grasmere, Belfast, Newcastle and Stalybridge near Manchester. In Gilbert’s Glory, Radio 4, she wrote and presented five programmes on the life and work of librettist and theatre impresario W S Gilbert.
In 2010 and 2011 she wrote and presented two five part series Wild Things I and II following responses to British wild animals through history, literature, folklore, science and cinema, discussed her novel Where the Serpent Lives on Woman’s Hour, and on Radio 3 discussed the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish.
In 2009, on Desert Island Discs, her choices were Beethoven’s A Minor String Quartet Opus 132, Kathleen Ferrier singing “Blow the Wind Southerly”, Muddy Waters singing, ‘I’m Ready for You,’ the Recordare from ‘Dies Irae’ in Verdi’s Requiem; a Cretan mantinada (To Iasemi choris nero – ‘Jasmine can’t live without water nor a heart without love’) sung by lyra player Kalogridis; the Terzetto E voi ridete from Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte Act I, Scene 3; Bach’s Double Violin Concerto, and Melina Merkouri singing ‘The boys from Peiraeus’ from the film Never on Sunday.
For Radio 4 she wrote and presented Darwin – My Ancestor, five programmes on the life and thought of Charles Darwin, and for Radio 3 wrote and presented Searching for Alfred in the Shadow of Tennyson, on the life and work of Tennyson.
In 2007, she wrote and presented a four-part Radio 4 series, The Enigma I Will Not Explain, exploring Elgar’s life and Enigma Variations. For Radio 3, she talked about playing the viola for The Essay series When Writers Play.
In 2006, she wrote and presented a five-part Radio 4 series, A Tale Teller for Our Times exploring the life and work of Hans Anderson through five of his stories.
In 2004, she discussed her book Tigers in Red Weather on Woman’s Hour.
In 2003, she chaired a Radio 3 discussion on the reconciliation between Priam and Achilles between poet U.A. Fanthorpe and scholar Penelope Murray, for the final episode of Homeric Encounters, in which scholars and poets interpreted characters from Homer’s Iliad.
In 2002, she talked to Woman’s Hour about her poetry collection Voodoo Shop.
Between 2002 and 2006, she wrote and presented Close Encounters, a series of opera interval talks for Radio 3. In 2006 she discussed the ways in which Verdi flouted 19th-century convention in La Traviata; in 2002, she discussed the war of the sexes in Cosi Fan Tutte, and the relationship between Ariadne, archetypal abandoned woman, and Bacchus the god of wine, in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos.
In 2000, Verdi’s centenary year, she re-worked Traviata in a short story for BBC Radio 3 entitled The Radar Angels.
Recording BBC’s Poetry Workshop on Scalybridge Station, Manchester, 2012
Poetry Reading on Lesbos, Greece, 2019