Ruth Padel

Ruth Sophia Padel
Born	1946 (age 77–78) Wimpole Street, London
Nationality	British
Occupation(s)	Poet Novelist Writer Conservationist Academic Broadcaster
Spouse	Myles Burnyeat
Children	1
Website	www.ruthpadel.com

Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS (Template:Pron-en pə-DEL)) (born 1946) is a British poet and author, a novelist and former academic noted for her nature writing in several genres, described by The Daily Telegraph as "a poet and scholar with a beautifully patient understanding, reminiscent of Ted Hughes, of how the natural world invests itself in our experience." Padel is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London and from 2004 to 2006 was Chair of the United Kingdom's Poetry Society. She has published seven volumes of poetry, a novel, and an eclectic range of non-fiction: a book about wild tiger conservation, influential popular books on reading contemporary poetry, books on psychology and religion in ancient Greece and another on Greek mythology, masculinity and rock music. She broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 and 4, and writes reviews for The Guardian, is Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, and Writer in Residence at The Environment Institute, University College, London.

Family

Padel is the eldest child of psychoanalyst John Hunter Padel and his wife Hilda Horatia Barlow, daughter of Sir (James) Alan Noel Barlow, 2nd Baronet and Nora (nee Darwin). Through her maternal grandmother, Darwin scholar Nora Barlow (daughter of Horace Darwin), Padel is a great-great-grand-daughter of naturalist Charles Darwin.. Her younger brother is the historian Oliver Padel. She was born in the top floor of the family house in Wimpole Street where the medical practice of her great-grandfather Sir Thomas Barlow had been located. In October 2009 Padel was invited to the Yorkshire village of Edgworth, to commemorate the gift of the Barlow Institute, given by her great granddfather Sir Thomas Barlow to the village in 1909.

Life and Work

Padel attended North London Collegiate School, before studying classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She wrote a PhD on Greek Tragedy at Oxford University and taught Greek at Oxford, Cambridge and Birkbeck College, London before becoming a freelance writer. After obtaining her doctorate from the University of Oxford on Greek tragedy, she taught Greek at Oxford and Birkbeck, University of London. She was the first holder of the Bowra Junior Research Fellowship at Wadham College, Oxford, which at that point (1976) altered its Statutes to accommodate female Fellows. She was therefore among the first women to become Fellows of formerly all-male Oxford colleges. Padel taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton University in 1995 and myth in Buenos Aires. She lived in Greece and Crete for several years, and as a student helped to excavate Minoan roads and tombs on Crete. She sang in the Schola Cantorum of Oxford, the Choir of Église Saint-Eustache, Paris and an Istanbul nightclub. Padel is currently a freelance poet and writer living in London. From 1984 to 2000 she was married to Professor Myles Burnyeat, the classical scholar and philosopher. They have one daughter. In 1985 her first pamphlet of poems, Alibi, was published by The Many Press and she left academia to support herself by reviewing, for newspapers including The Independent, The Times, Financial Times and The New York Times, while authoring two books for Princeton University Press on ideas of the mind in ancient Greece, In 1997 she won the UK National Poetry Competition and in 1998 came to public prominence writing a popular poetry column in London's Independent on Sunday of close readings of contemporary poems, developed in her books 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey. Padel's non-fiction includes I'm A Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll (in which she argues that the mythic connections in rock music between male sexuality, anxiety, misogyny and aggression derive from Ancient Greece) and an Asian travel-memoir which is also an able account of modern tiger conservation. In 2008, as first Writer in Residence at Somerset House, Padel curated a series of Writers' Talks on paintings in the Gallery of the Courtauld Institute of Art and in 2010 gave one such talk herself on "Landscape with Flight into Egypt" by Pieter Bruegel, of which a portion was printed in The Guardian newspaper. From 2009-10 Padel was Poet in Residence at Christ's College, Cambridge, and in 2010 published three books, Silent Letters of the Alphabet, lectures on poetry's use of silence which she had given in Newcastle University in 2008, a selection and introduction to the poetry of Sir Walter Ralegh, and a novel Where the Serpent Lives noted for its treatment of wildlife. She also wrote a poem 'Allele' on genetics for a choral composition by composer Michael Zev Gordon, premiered at the Cheltenham Music Festival and Royal Society of Medicine. debated poetry and prayer with Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury at Norwich Cathedral, gave a poetry reading with him at Christ's College, Cambridge to commemorate its 500th anniversary of its chapel, and delivered a Lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons in honour of Thomas Vicary on "Charles Darwin, John Hunter and Imagining the Inside". In October 2010, she became Writer in Residence at The Environment Institute of University College London.

Poetry

Padel has published seven poetry collections. Science and history have underpinned her poetry from the start. Her first full-length collection, Summer Snow, 1990, draws on her knowledge of ancient Greece, especially Crete. She won the 1996 UK National Poetry Competition with a long poem, “Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire,” based on an Andy Goldsworthy ice sculpture. Four of her seven collections, Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Voodoo Shop, The Soho Leopard and Darwin - A Life in Poems, have been shortlisted for all the major British poetry prizes. Her lyrical biography of Charles Darwin covered his science, family and life in ‘snapshots, epiphanies, symbolic fragments, what the 17th-century poets might have called emblems’. It was noted as innovative work of 'drama, speed, intensity, gleaming tropical imagery and an inner voice resonant with wondrous and tragic overtones. Its emotional centre is the Darwins' marriage, shaken by religious belief and the death of their daughter, dramatised in bleak and painful poems.’ Critics and reviewers characterized her poetry of the late 1990s and early 2000's as lyrical, musical, passionate and emotionally subtle, with rich language, vivid humanism, glittering imagery and cool vernacular, a wide range of reference, passion, wit, music, texture and elegance: 'as if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in," according to the Times Literary Supplement, containing themes of science, love, nature and history and unusual 'energy within and against the line. Her quoted influences include Gerard Manley Hopkins and choral passages in Greek tragedy where, she has said, "the words curl in images over each other" and "one word can turn the whole feel of a poem over on itself". It has been claimed that her poetry 'shows us something important about the work of poetry; that though the image itself may fade. it may nevertheless have opened a “slash of light”' and that behind her work is a ‘big-picture view of what poetry is or could be... - part of the way everyman or woman goes on’. The three poetry collections she published between 1998 and 2004, Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Voodoo Shop and The Soho Leopard, betray themes of the three other books she worked on over those years, music (I’m a Man- Sex, Gods and Rock ‘n’ Roll), attention to the line and to clarity (52 Ways of Looking At A Poem), and wildlife (Tigers in Red Weather), exemplified in poems such as 'Writing to Onegin', 'Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfrieeshire' and 'Tiger Drinking at Forest Pool'. More recent poems such as 'Pieter the Funny One', on Pieter Bruegel’s ‘Triumph of Death’, which won 3rd Prize in the 2006 Arvon Competition, and her poem 'Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth', which she has stated came out of listening to a concert of oud players from Nazareth, suggest a new direction. Padel was Chair of the Judges for the 2010 Forward Poetry Prize.

Writings About Poetry

"Ruth Padel combines two major gifts," said literary critic George Steiner about Padel's influential book 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem. "She is a distinguished poet with a delightful skill in explanation and the instinct of a caring, clearsighted guide to how poetry works and why it matters." As a scholar of tragedy Padel defined the tragic hero as the embodiment of the human mind, 'which lives catastrophe, suffers damage and endures.' In her early books In and Out of the Mind and Whom Gods Destroy(on madness in Greek Tragedy and later tragedy both Renaissance and modern), she focussed on Hermes, the god of interpretation and ended the latter work by analysing the image of Munch's The Scream whose face resembles a tragic mask. Her books for the more general reader on reading contemporary poetry are 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, The Poem and the Journey, and Silent Letters of the Alphabet, which uses her ‘blend of acute literary analysis, psychological and mythological learning, knowledge of Greek poetics and a trust in the energy of today's poetry’, on issues such as metaphor, tone, rhyme, Echo, the music of John Cage and 'what happens when Paul Durcan plays Seamus Heaney at ping pong'. As critic, she reads with aural acuity, is not polemical and her precision does not obscure but builds the big picture. She addresses the general reader but with 'peculiar rigour and utmost attention to the page’ and reads Julia Darling alongside Jeremy Prynne, reading each poem for what binds it together. In 2006, at the opening festival of T S Eliot Festival at Little Gidding 70 years after the poet’s visit there, Padel described the contrast between Eliot's memories of Little Gidding and his London experience of The Blitz while 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 last volume of Palestinan poet Mahmoud Darwish, comparing his writing to that of Seamus Heaney in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and T S Eliot during the London blitz. She has also written Introductions to the works of two other Palestinian poets, Mourid Barghouti and Ramsey Nasr. Noted as an inspiring teacher, and reader of her work, she was Poet in Residence for the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts in 2002. and in 2009 first Poet in Residence at Christ's College, Cambridge. She opened the 2009 Edinburgh International Book Festival with a reading of 'Darwin - A Life in Poems' and in 2010 at the same Festival read from her novel Where the Serpent Lives, curating and introducing a mini-series of literary events around “Writing the Family”. As first Writer in Residence at Somerset House in 2008 she inaugurated a series of Writers' Talks beginning with Philip Pullman at the gallery of the Courtauld Institute of Art. In March 2009 she read and discussed Darwin at the University of Havana, and for the Poetry Society of America at Lillian Vernon House, New York and New York Botanical Garden. In 2010, as Resident Poet in the Environment Institute, University College London, she has given talks, workshops and reading on nature, writing and the environment. In Mumbai in 2010 she read and talked at the Bombay Natural History Society and Prithvi Theatre on science, nature writing, and tiger conservation.

Darwin - A Life in Poems

Noted as a 'versatile' poet, a writer who engaged with big ideas and one of 'Britain’s leading female thinkers', Padel in her 2009 collection Darwin - A Life in Poems covered the science, travels and family life of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin, creating a lyric 'mini-biography' welcomed by scientists and by the literary community as innovative work of drama, speed and poetic intensity, and an inner voice resonant with tragic overtones’. It was not a continuous ‘life’ but ‘snapshots, epiphanies, symbolic fragments, taking as its emotional centre the Darwins' marriage, shaken by religious belief and the death of their daughter, dramatised in bleak and painful poems’. Since Padel is a Darwin descendent the work was also a family memoir illuminating the role of Padel’s grandmother, Darwin scholar Nora Barlow, in restoring to his autobiography some controversial lines (dropped at Emma's request by Darwin's son Francis) in which Darwin said he did not see how anyone could wish the doctrine of hell to be true. Her book was noted by The Economist, Financial Times and biographer Richard Holmes as a 'new species of biography.' It portrayed Darwin's childhood, connecting the early loss of his mother with his passion for collecting, links his first steps into the natural world with his haunted memories of attending medical operations in Edinburgh, and to his tutor in taxidermy John Edmonstone, a freed slave from Guiana. The book's centre is Charles's relationship with his wife, his first cousin Emma Wedgwood. Padel has attributed the connection she felt with Charles and Emma while writing her poems to memories of her grandmother Nora Barlow, Darwin's grand-daughter.

Fiction

From 2000, Padel published and broadcast short stories in magazines such as Dublin Review, London Magazine and Prospect Magazine and on BBC Radio 3. Her first novel, Where the Serpent Lives (2010) was set in forests of India, the woodlands of Devon, and also London. In India the novel was connected with her earlier Tigers in Red Weather, as 'a sheer delight' in perspectives on tiger conservation and forests, and a 'magical' connection of nature, poetry and science. It was remarked as "magical" and a nature lover’s delight, compelling, acute, lyrical, and readable. "She has done for the forests of Karnataka and Bengal what Amitav Ghosh did for the Sundarbans in The Hungry Tide.” In the UK, The Guardian newspaper marked it as "a novel you will not lightly forget," one which “displaced the power and delicacy of Eros into the empathic gaze of the narrator towards the creaturely world. Only Emily Brontë has embraced Padel's radical and sympathetic inclusiveness of creaturely life." Others noted it as an ambitious work with evocative depictions of life in the fast-degrading forests of India. "Padel has a real feel for nature and is not just a nature-lover of the traditional kind." Writing about the illicit trade in wild animals, she paints an apocalyptic picture of the ways in which the world's wild animals are being endangered not only by the greed of criminals but also by the peasant's desperate search for sustenance in economies interested only in development. It was praised for its wildlife writing ("She brings a poet’s intensity to her prose: her narrative spirals like a tropical plant, luxuriant with metaphor and imagery, with a scientist’s rigour but a spellbound eye;"), for the way it combines "the world of myth and reality with immense ease", for its evocative prose, and for the way in which, "as in most of Padel’s works, poetry and science come together and create magic".

Non-Fiction

Padel is uniquely a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London as well as Royal Society of Literature She has an eclectic range of non-fiction books to her name, covering subjects as diverse as rock music and tiger biology to Greek tragedy. Her first prose work, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self was written both for the professional Hellenist and general readers: it explores Greek ideas of inwardness and how they shaped European notions of the self. Arguing that Greek poetic language connects consciousness, even male consciousness, with the darkness attributed to Hades and to women, Padel analyzes tragedy's metaphors, and the metaphors of disease in the Greek doctors, followers of Hippocrates, for clues to what the Greeks believed lies within us. Central to her discussion is tragedy's perennial question, how and why all human beings, female or male, suffer. She argues that tragedy, like its own vision of the self, is where the terrible can also, for a while, be good. Her background in anthropology, sociology, philosophy and psychoanalysis supports her argument that male Greek culture spoke of the mind as mainly female; passive and receptive rather than active and controlling. Her own language here is vivid, colloquial and precise. In her follow-up volume, Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Madness in Greek and Other Tragedy, she is said to investigate madness in tragedy with linguistic and poetic sensitivity, and again bring in wide reading from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare and the moderns, elucidating different views of madness in antiquity; and in modern times, to warn that 'For all our command of chemistry, our own chaotic approaches to madness and its relation to divinity are as anthropologically local, as historically constructed, as those of fifth-century Athens.' I’m a Man, Sex, Gods and Rock ‘n’ Roll(Faber 2000) traces the masculinity of rock music to Greek mythology. Padel has stated that she originally intended this work to focus on women ("From 500 BC until roughly 1970, whenever women or female characters sang about desire, the music and words they sang were written by men" and bounded by Greek concepts of music, myth and hero). But during the writing, she realized that analyzing the maleness of rock music, and the ways in which said maleness represented women, was essential before exploring what women had done with this form. The book had a mixed reception from male reviewers, but women reviewers described it as original, beautifully expressed, vivid, amusing and convincing and rock writers Charles Shaar Murray and Casper Llewellyn Smith stated it to be 'dazzling on the misogyny of rock music'and found the thesis that rock is ‘a wishing well of masculinity', which draws on mythic connections between male sexuality, aggression, anxiety and violence - connections which, they pointed out, 'are basically Greek’, both fascinating and provocative. The style and approach of her prose work Tigers in Red Weather were valued for the insights offered on contemporary tiger conservation but also for the quality of her nature writing, as "sheer delight in terms of perspectives on tiger conservation and imagery of the forests".

Tigers, Conservation, Environment

Padel's influential eco-memoir Tigers in Red Weather (2005) explores front-line conservation of wild tigers in Asia, drawing on her scientific background and Darwinian descent., received as gripping, informative, dazzling and deeply impressive, with exemplary field research and a sharp eye for telling detail and local dialogue,‘There are few women writing non-fiction today with such a sophisticated understanding of language, such a nuanced approach to style and such brazen willingness to engage with the big issues, personal and political.’ It was received as 'a first-class travel book': ‘Occasionally you open a new book, read a few pages and just know: This is special.’ Reviewers praised the ear for dialogue, introductions to little-known parts of the world such as Bhutan and Ussuriland, and the humor: Sakteng, near the Himalayas, is the world's only reserve for yeti. "Bhutanese ones can make themselves invisible so there are not many sightings." But center stage is the tiger ("The tiger is the wild. If it goes, part of us goes with it: our sense that something out there is stronger, more beautiful; something not us") and the dilemma of the conservationist, ‘living uncomfortably alone in remote places between despair and day-to-day hope.’ Since writing it she has continued to work on tigers and the environment. In 2010 she was appointed Writer in Residence at the Environment Institute, University College, London.

Broadcasting

Padel's broadcasting reflects her interest in 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. But she has said that if she could choose any other career it would be opera director and she has written and broadcast extensively on opera and music. For London Review of Books she has written on ‘putting words into women’s mouths’ in opera, and on the sixteenth-century madrigal ‘‘Thule, the Period of Cosmographie’ by Thomas Weelkes. For a Radio 3 Essay series, ‘Writers as Musicians’, she spoke about playing the viola, an instrument whose ‘inner voice’ illlustrates her Newcastle Poetry Lectures Silent Letters of the Alphabet. Padel has also broadcast BBC Radio 3 interval talks, "Close Encounters", analyzing operas from the point of view of one scene between two characters. For BBC Radio 4 she has written and presented several series of features on writers, scientists and composers, including Hans Christian Andersen, Edward Elgar and Charles Darwin, as well as her own short stories. In January 2009, she was a guest on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4. Her music choices were Recordare from the Requiem (Verdi) the opening of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 132 in A Minor, ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ sung by Kathleen Ferrier, ‘I’m Ready for You’ sung by Muddy Waters, ‘To Giasemi Horis Nero –Jasmine Without Water cannot Live,’ a Cretan folksong sung by Giorgos Kalogridis, noted early performer of the music of Crete; Mozart’s ‘E Voi Ridete?’ from Cosi Fan Tutte, the Second Movement of Bach’s Double Concerto in D Minor and ‘Ta Paidia apo ton Pirea, or The Boys from Piraeus,’ from the film Never on Sunday sung by Melina Mercouri. Her single record was Cosi Fan Tutte and her book was The Iliad by Homer. Her luxury was a herd of deer; this was disallowed, since no live animals are allowed. Instead she chose paper and pencils.

Awards, Appointments

• 1992 Wingate Scholarship [29]
• 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 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

Oxford Professor of Poetry

In 2009 Padel was elected Professor of Poetry, the first woman elected since this Chair's inception in 1708, defeating Indian poet Arvind Mehrotra. She received 297 votes: a larger percentage of the electorate than her predecessor Christopher Ricks who received 214 votes in 2004. or James Fenton who received 228 in 1994. (The system has since been changed from voting in person to voting online, which allows many more votes.) However Padel resigned before taking up office following allegations in the British press that she had smeared her main rival Novel-Prize-winner Derek Walcott who withdrew before the election: a series of events attributed by American commentators to a gender war, by others to misogyny, and by London's The Observer newspaper to ‘toxicity of the metropolitan media’. A media storm which "had everything, from sex claims to allegations of character assassination", allowing the media "simultaneously to pursue allegations in Walcott's past and criticize Padel for having mentioned these allegations as a source of voters' disquiet", broke a week before the election when The Sunday Times reported that photocopied pages of a University of Illinois publication, detailing cases of sexual harassment laid against Walcott at Boston University and Harvard University, had been sent to various Oxford academics, and Walcott withdrew. His candidacy had been controversial in the University from the start; some counselled against on grounds of Walcott’s university past, others argued that his record was irrelevant since the post does not require the holder to have contact with students. Newspapers had claimed Walcott was the favourite but The Times pointed out that 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. Walcott announced his withdrawal not through Oxford University but through London's newspaper "The Evening Standard", which then led a series of allegations against Padel picked up by other papers. Padel criticized the anonymous missives, said 'I wish he had not pulled out' and denied any connection with them. There was no evidence to link her to them but the press widely alleged her involvement, and after her election The Evening Standard followed by "The Times" published emails in which, in responding to requests for information on pre-election opinion at Oxford, she had mentioned voters' unease at Walcott's university record, which was in the public domain. There was no evidence that her emails had led either to any published article or to Walcott's withdrawal from the election but Padel resigned, saying she had been naive to mention disquiet about Walcott's teaching record and apologizing for doing anything which could be misconstrued as against Walcott. 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. A letter to the Times Literary Supplement complained of unfair media pursuit of Walcott's past while letters to The Guardian complained of unjust denigration of Padel, claiming she was justly held in high regard for her poetry and teaching; 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 writer 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.

Select Bibliography

• Woman: Model for Possession by Greek Daemons (1983)
• "Homer's Reader: A Reading of George Seferis" (1986)
• Alibi (1985) poems.
• Summer Snow (1990) poems
• In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (1992)
• Angel (1993) poems
• Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness (1995)
• Fusewire (1996) poems
• Rembrandt Would Have Loved You (1998)
• I'm a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll (2000)
• 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: How Reading Modern Poetry Can Change Your Life (2002)
• Voodoo Shop (2002) poems
• Soho Leopard (2004) poems
• Tigers in Red Weather (2005) Tiger conservation, Travel and Poetry
• The Poem and the Journey (2006)
• Darwin: a Life in Poems (2009) poetry and biography
• 'Against Tiger Farming', China Dialogue October 21, 2009
• Where the Serpent Lives (2010) novel
• Silent Letters of the Alphabet (2010) poetry lectures
• Walter Ralegh, Selected Poems (2010)

External links

• Personal Website
• Ruth Padel Biography
• Chair of Poetry Supporters Website