Ruth Padel

Ruth Padel (FRSL, FRZL) is an internationally published writer of poetry, novels, nonfiction and criticism with close links to Greece, western classical music and wildlife conservation, especially in India. Her poetry collections include We Are All from Somewhere Else, a meditation on migration, animal and human; Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, on conflict and harmony; Darwin: A Life in Poems, shortlisted for the Costa prize, on the life and thought of Charles Darwin, her great-great-grandfather; Beethoven Variations, on the life of the composer; Watershed, on water and climate denial, and Emerald, an elegiac collection on grief and renewal. Her nonfiction includes In and Out of the Mind, on the idea of the self in Greek tragedy, and Tigers in Red Weather, shortlisted for the Kiriwama prize, on tiger conservation. Her novels include Where the Serpent Lives, featuring king cobra conservation, and Daughters of the Labyrinth, which explores the legacy of the Holocaust on the island of Crete, where she used to live. Her criticism includes books on reading contemporary poetry, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey, which rose from her popular weekly column ‘The Sunday Poem’. 

She is Professor Emerita of Poetry at King’s College London and Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London. She is currently finishing a nonfiction book on Asian elephants. Girl, her thirteenth poetry collection, is published November 2024.