Ruth Padel



Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS (born 8 May 1946) is an award-winning English poet, a non-fiction author known for her poetry criticism, nature writing, and connections with science,  and more recently a novelist. She broadcasts on poetry, literature, music and wildlife for BBC Radio 3 and 4.

Life
Padel is daughter of psychoanalyst John Hunter Padel and Hilda, daughter of Sir (James) Alan Noel Barlow 2nd Baronet and Nora Barlow, née Darwin, grand-daughter of Charles Darwin, through whom Padel is Darwin's great-great-grandchild. Her brother is historian Oliver Padel; cousins include prison reformer Una Padel, sculptor Phyllida Barlow and biographer Randal Keynes. Her uncle is Horace Barlow. Padel was born in Wimpole Street where her great-grandfather Sir Thomas Barlow practised medicine. She attended North London Collegiate School, studied classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford where she sang in the Schola Cantorum of Oxford, wrote a PhD on Greek poetry, and was first Bowra Research Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford, which altered its Statutes for her to accommodate female Fellows. She was thus among the first women to become Fellows of formerly all-male Oxford colleges. She taught Greek at Oxford and Birkbeck, University of London, taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton University, has lived extensively in Greece, and in Paris where she sang in the Choir of Église Saint-Eustache, Paris. Her publishing career began in 1985, while she was teaching Greek at Birkbeck College, with a poetry pamphlet. Later she left academe to support herself by reviewing and publish her first collection, 1990. She was married to philosopher Myles Burnyeat.

Poetry
Padel has published eight collections, four through the 1990s, winning the 1996 UK National Poetry Competition,” and four between 2002 and 2012, most recently The Mara Crossing, a meditation on migration, animal and human, whose form is said to revivify the prosimetrum, a mediaeval mixed genre of poetry and prose.

From 1998 to 2004, Padel's collections reflected themes from simultaneously-written non-fiction: music (for I’m a Man - Sex, Gods and Rock ‘n’ Roll); technical attention to the poetic line (as in 52 Ways of Looking At A Poem, exemplified in poems such as 'Writing to Onegin' and 'Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfrieshire', her National Poetry Competition winner) ; and wildlife (for Tigers in Red Weather) as for example, "Tiger Drinking at Forest Pool". Her poems on migration combine biology and history to place human migration in a wider context. Recent poems also reflect an interest in the Middle East: on Pieter Bruegel’s "Triumph of Death",  the 2002 Siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, "Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth", which she has stated came from hearing Le Trio Joubran; in addition to a conversation with Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti , and Introduction to the posthumous diary and poems of Mahmoud Darwish.

Poetry, Science and Darwin
Padel's interest in combining poetry, science and religion is reflected in poems on genetics, debates on poetry and prayer with Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury    lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons, her work on Charles Darwin and a residency at the Environment Institute, University College London. Engaged in relating poetry and science,  , Padel was a judge for the 2005 Aventis Science Prize for the Royal Society has written poems on genetics and zoology,  and her book on migration is said to connect micro-level cell migration with macro-level social migration in a double helix. Her poems on Charles Darwin, said to reveal the commonality between poetry and science, employ his theories, writings, letters and journals. They were received as innovative work by scientists and the literary community. Embracing Darwin's life, family and science, the book was reviewed as a "new species" of biography in verse. its staging by the Mephisto Stage Company, Ireland, intensifies the interplay between the scientific and the spiritual that permeates this collection, whose emotional centre is the Darwins' marriage, shaken by divergent religious belief and the death of a daughter. Since Padel is a Darwin descendant, this work was also a family memoir. Her preface illuminates the role of Padel’s grandmother, Nora Barlow, who in editing Darwin's Autobiography restored a passage in which Darwin said he did not see how anyone could wish the doctrine of hell to be true; this had been deleted by the first editor, Darwin's son Francis, at his mother's request. Padel's poems connected Darwin's loss of his mother as a child with his passion for collecting; and linked his early scientific writing with his taxidermy teacher in Edinburgh John Edmonstone, a freed slave from Guiana.

Criticism, Teaching
From 1998 to 2001 Padel pioneered The Sunday Poem, an influential weekly column in London's Independent on Sunday whose close readings of contemporary poems she collected and developed in her popular books 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey. As Chair of the UK Poetry Society 2004-2007, she presided over the establishment of poetry 'Stanzas' across the UK. In 2010 she chaired Judges for the Forward Poetry Prize, in 2011 delivered the Housman Lecture at the Hay Festival on "The Name and Nature of Poetry." and began Radio 4's Poetry Workshop: a series of programmes on writing poetry in which she leads workshops with poetry groups across the UK. Her books on reading contemporary poetry, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (2002) and The Poem and the Journey (2005), and her 1998-2001 newspaper column from which these volumes grew, have influenced a decade of writing about poetry in the UK, followed by her Newcastle University 'Bloodaxe' Lectures on poetry's use of silence, Silent Letters of the Alphabet. Her criticism is reported to employ close analysis, knowledge of Greek poetics, myth, metaphor, tone and rhyme; she is said to read with aural acuity, generosity and no polemic; her precision "does not obscure but builds the big picture", addressing the general reader but with "utmost attention to the page".

She has written introductions to the works of Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti and Ramsey Nasr, and British poets Walter Ralegh, Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins. At the opening festival of the T S Eliot Festival at Little Gidding in 2006, 70 years after Eliot's visit there, Padel described the contrast between Eliot's memories of Little Gidding and his experience of The Blitz whilst writing the poem. "It reminded him there was still a place that had a sense of truth." She returned to this moment in her Forward to the posthumous volume of Mahmoud Darwish, comparing his sense of the poet's role in a time of violence to that of Seamus Heaney in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and of Eliot during the London blitz.

Radio, Music
Padel's radio work focusses on music, literature, nature and the environment. In Wild Things, a series of radio essays for Radio 3, she explored the myths and ecology of five British wild creatures. She has broadcast a series of BBC Radio 3 opera interval talks and has stated that if she could choose any other career it would be that of opera director. She has written on opera and a sixteenth-century madrigal for the London Review of Books, and in a Radio 3 essay series, Writers as Musicians, she spoke about playing viola, an instrument whose "inner voice" illustrates her Newcastle Poetry Lectures Silent Letters of the Alphabet,. For BBC Radio 4 she has written and presented features on writers, scientists and composers including Hans Christian Andersen, Edward Elgar, Charles Darwin and W.S. Gilbert. As guest on Desert Island Discs., chosen works included Beethoven String Quartet Opus 132, Verdi's Requiem, "Down by the Salley Gardens" sung by Kathleen Ferrier, "I’m Ready for You" sung by Muddy Waters, a Cretan folksong and "The Boys from Piraeus", from the film Never on Sunday. Her luxury was a herd of deer.

Oxford Professor of Poetry
Padel is the first woman to be elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. (She received 297 votes. Her predecessors James Fenton and Christopher Ricks were elected on 228 and 214 votes respectively in 1994 and 2004. The system now admits online voting which admits a wider electorate.)   Her election however took place amid a media storm after anonymous pages from a University of Illinois publication, detailing sexual harassment charges laid at Boston University and Harvard University against her main rival Derek Walcott, were sent to unspecified Oxford academics. Walcott withdrew his candidature, which had been controversial in the University: some counselled against on grounds of his university record in the US, others argued this was irrelevant as the post does not require student contact.

Some newspapers claimed Walcott was the favourite; The Times pointed out this was a lazy understanding of a system which does not admit of favourites: the number of supporters listed in the University Gazette gives no clue to the final outcome. Padel criticized the anonymous missives, said "I wish he had not pulled out" and denied connection with them but the press widely alleged her involvement and on her election published an email in which, asked for information on pre-election opinion at Oxford, she had mentioned voters' unease at silence about Walcott's record. . There was no evidence that anything Padel had written led to Walcott's withdrawal, but she resigned, stating that she did not want to do the job under suspicion, and apologized for having written anything which could be misconstrued as against Walcott.

American commentators attributed public treatment of Padel to a gender war. and some British commentators to misogyny,. London's The Observer referred it to ‘the toxicity of the metropolitan media’. The story "had everything, from sex claims to allegations of character assassination." It allowed the press "simultaneously to pursue allegations in Walcott's past and criticize Padel for having mentioned these allegations as a source of voters' disquiet". Asked if she would encourage Walcott to stand again, Padel replied, "Yes, if he wants. I think he'd do good lectures."

Letters to British newspapers criticized media handling of the affair. Letters to The Guardian complained of unfair denigration of Padel, "justly held in high regard for her poetry and teaching." A letter to The Times Literary Supplement complained of unfair media pursuit of Walcott's past. A letter to The Times claimed that Oxford had "missed out for the worst of reasons on an inspirational teacher: Walcott removed the decision from the electorate by his own choice; Padel should not have been made to pay for his decision to confront neither his accusers nor his past." On Newsnight Review, the poet Simon Armitage and poetry promoter Josephine Hart expressed regret about her resignation. "Ruth's a good person," Simon Armitage said. "I don't think she should have resigned, she would have been good." Padel subsequently supported Geoffrey Hill in the following election in which Hill was appointed.

Style, Themes
Padel's themes include science, nature, painting, music, history, wildlife and human relations. She is described as influenced by the 19th century's curiosity and desire to make links. Her stylistic hallmarks are said to be rich imagery, technical skill and musicality; wit, passion and lyrical intelligence, with internal rhyme, half-rhyme and enjambment deployed to song-like effects, displaying unusual energy within and against the line,   'As if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in." Quoted influences include Gerard Manley Hopkins and Greek choral lyrics where, she has claimed, "the words curl in images over each other."

Scholarship and Greek Myth
Padel has published an eclectic range of non-fiction, beginning with books for Princeton University Press on ancient Greece. In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self explores the way Greek ideas of inwardness shaped European notions of the self. She used anthropology and psychoanalysis to support her thesis that male Greek culture spoke of the mind as mainly "female" and receptive rather than "male" and active. Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Madness in Greek and Other Tragedy investigates madness in tragedy from the Greeks to Shakespeare and the moderns, parsing different views of madness in different societies. She presented the tragic hero as embodiment of the human mind, 'which lives catastrophe, suffers damage and endures.'

Her subsequent work I'm A Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll(2000) argues that rock music began as a ‘wishing well of masculinity,' which drew on mythic connections between male sexuality, aggression, anxiety, misogyny and violence which derived from Ancient Greece. Padel has stated that she intended this to focus on women's voices but realized that it was essential first to analyze the maleness of rock music. The book had a mixed reception from male reviewers. Women reviewers described it as original, beautifully expressed, vivid, amusing and convincing; Rock writers Charles Shaar Murray and Casper Llewellyn Smith found it 'provocative and fascinating' and her analysis of rock's misogyny 'dazzling.'

Nature Writing: Wildlife and Conservation
Padel is an Ambassador for the UK's New Networks for Nature, an alliance of practitioners in different fields who celebrate and draw creative inspiration from Britain's nature and wildlife. Her account of wild tiger conservation, drawing on her scientific background and Darwinian descent, was valued internationally for its insights on conservation, for its travel writing. with introductions to little-known parts of the world such as Sumatra, Bhutan and Ussuriland, its ear for dialogue, the quality of nature writing, and portrait of both the tiger and the field-zoologist, ‘living uncomfortably alone, in remote places, between despair and day-to-day hope.’ Padel continues to write and broadcast on tigers and more widely on wildlife.

Fiction
Padel's novel Where the Serpent Lives, focussing on wildlife crime in India and the UK,  was noted for vivid nature writing, innovative use of science, and the animal's viewpoint in wildlife description. In India and UK, reviewers commented on the imaginative connections between nature, poetry and science. "She has done for the forests of Karnataka and Bengal what Amitav Ghosh did for the Sundarbans in The Hungry Tide."

Recognition
Padel was Poet in Residence for the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts in 2002 and opened the 2009 Edinburgh International Book Festival with a reading of 'Darwin - A Life in Poems.' The following year at the same festival she curated and presented a series of literary events around “Writing the Family”. She has been Writer in Residence at Christ's College, Cambridge and as first Writer in Residence at Somerset House she inaugurated the Writers' Talks at the  Courtauld Institute of Art. In March 2009 she read and discussed Darwin at the University of Havana, at the Poetry Society of America in Lillian Vernon House, New York and at the New York Botanical Garden. Since 2005 she has taught and lectured on conservation, nature writing and the environment and was Resident Poet in the Environment Institute, University College London, 2010–2011. She has read and lectured on nature in Mumbai, at the Bombay Natural History Society and Prithvi Theatre.

Awards and honours

 * 1992 Wingate Scholarship
 * 1994 Arts Council Writers’ Award for poetry collection Fusewire
 * 1996 First Prize, UK National Poetry Competition
 * 1996 First Prize, UK National Poetry Competition
 * 1998 Rembrandt Would Have Loved You Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for T S Eliot Prize
 * 1998 Appointed Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature
 * 2000 Cholmondeley Award from Society of Authors
 * 2002 Poetry Residency at Henry Wood Promenade Concerts
 * 2002 Voodoo Shop Poetry Book Society Recommendation, short-listed for T. S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award
 * 2003 Research Award from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
 * 2004 The Soho Leopard Poetry Book Society Choice, short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize
 * 2005 Tigers in Red Weather shortlisted in USA for Kiriyama Prize and in UK for Dolman Best Travel Book Award.
 * 2006 Arts Council of England Individual Writer’s Bursary
 * 2008 First Writer in Residence at Somerset House, London
 * 2009 Leverhulme Artist in Residence Award at Christ's College, Cambridge
 * 2009 Elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University
 * 2009 British Council Darwin Now Award
 * 2009 Darwin - A Life in Poems shortlisted for Costa Book Awards for poetry
 * 2010-2011 Writer in Residence at the Environment Institute, University College London
 * 2010 Chair of Forward Poetry Prize
 * 2011 Inaugurated 'Poetry Workshop' on BBC Radio 4
 * 2012 The Mara Crossing shortlisted for London Poetry Awards

Poetry

 * Alibi 1985
 * Summer Snow 1990
 * Angel 1993
 * Fusewire 1996
 * Rembrandt Would Have Loved You 1998
 * Voodoo Shop 2002
 * Soho Leopard 2004
 * Darwin - A Life in Poems 2009
 * The Mara Crossing 2012

Criticism, Editing

 * 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: How Reading Modern Poetry Can Change Your Life 2002
 * The Poem and the Journey 2006
 * Silent Letters of the Alphabet 2010
 * Walter Ralegh, Selected Poems 2010
 * Alfred Lord Tennyson (Folio Society, Introduction and Notes) 2007
 * Gerard Manley Hopkins (Folio Society, Introduction) 2011

Non-fiction

 * In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self 1992
 * Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness 1995
 * I'm a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll 2000
 * Tigers in Red Weather 2005

Fiction

 * Where the Serpent Lives 2010