Ruth Padel

Ruth Padel is a non-fiction author, novelist and conservationist with close links to Greece, India, classical music and wildlife but first of all an award-winning poet. She has won the National Poetry Competition and published thirteen acclaimed poetry collections, most recently Girl, a meditation on girlhood. Her non-fiction includes books on Greek tragedy, the influence of Greek myth on rock music, tiger conservation, and (following her popular newspaper column ‘The Sunday Poem’) how to read a poem. Her first novel focussed on wildlife in India, her second on the Holocaust in Crete. She has sung in a Turkish nightclub, played viola in Westminster Abbey and used to sing the examples for a Radio 3 series of opera talks, ‘Close Encounters’. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, Professor of Poetry Emerita at King’s College London and currently Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Magdalene College Cambridge.