21 Facts About Ruth Padel

Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS was born on 8 May 1946 and is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author.

Ruth Padel studied Greek at Oxford, where she sang in Schola Cantorum of Oxford, wrote a PhD on ancient Greek poetry, and was a Research Fellow at Wadham College, which altered its Statutes for her to allow female Fellows.

Ruth Padel taught Greek at Oxford, Cambridge and Birkbeck College, University of London, taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton University, and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she sang in the Choir of Eglise Saint-Eustache, and at the British School of Archaeology in Athens, for which she helped excavate the Royal Road at Knossos.

Ruth Padel has served as Trustee for Zoological Society of London and conservation charity New Networks for Nature, Chair of UK Poetry Society and Professor of Poetry, King's College London.

Ruth Padel's parents were pychoanalyst John Hunter Padel and Hilda Barlow, daughter of Alan Barlow and Nora Barlow nee Darwin, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, through whom Padel is Darwin's great-great-grandchild.

From 1998 to 2004, Ruth Padel's collections reflect themes of simultaneously written non-fiction: music ; technical attention to the poetic line ; and wildlife.

Ruth Padel has held dialogues with Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, and written an Introduction to the posthumous poems of Mahmoud Darwish.

Since Ruth Padel is a Darwin descendant, the book was a family memoir.

Ruth 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.

Since 2013, Ruth Padel has written and performed sequences of poems on composers in conjunction with the Endellion String Quartet: first on Josef Haydn's Seven Last Words, which formed the central crucifixion section in her 2014 collection Learning to make an Oud in Nazareth; subsequently on Beethoven's late quartets and Schubert's Death and the Maiden.

Ruth Padel was first Writer in Residence at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and is said to be a lifelong choral singer; she has presented Radio 3's programme "The Choir", 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.

Ruth Padel has written on women's voices in opera and on 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.

Ruth Padel's non-fiction began with Princeton University Press studies of ancient Greek drama and the mind.

Ruth Padel 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.

Ruth Padel presented the tragic hero as embodiment of the human mind, 'which lives catastrophe, suffers damage and endures.

Ruth Padel has stated that she intended this to focus on women's voices but then felt she ought first to pick apart the maleness of rock music.

Ruth Padel is known for her poetry and prose on conservation, especially of tigers.

Ruth Padel's 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".

Ruth Padel 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, Ruth Padel described the contrast between Eliot's memories of Little Gidding and his experience of The Blitz whilst writing the poem.

Ruth Padel denied connection with these pages but media commentators alleged her involvement; she resigned, saying she did not wish to do the job under suspicion.