Padel, Ruth

(1946- )

   The great great-grand-daughter of Charles Darwin, she was born in London and educated at the Sorbonne, Paris, the Free University, Berlin, and Oxford University, where her Ph.D. was on a Greek tragedy. She taught Greek at Oxford, Cambridge, and Birkbeck College, London, and opera in the Modern Greek Department, Princeton University, New Jersey. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and chair of the U.K. Poetry Society. Her talks on opera, Close Encounters, were broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Her book 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (2002) is based on her Sunday Poem discussion column for The Independent on Sunday. Her other non-fiction includes two books which link mind, madness, tragedy, myth and religion in ancient Greece to anthropology, psychoanalysis and poetry. She won the National Poetry Competition in 1997 and the Cholmondeley Award in 2003. Some of her poetry publications: Summer Snow, 1990. Angel, 1993. Fusewire, 1996. Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, 1998. Voodoo Shop, 2002. The Soho Leopard, 2004. Some of her poems: "On the Line," "On the Venom Farm," "Tell Me About It," "Watercourse," "Yew Berries."

   Sources: British Council Arts (http://www.contemporarywriters.com). Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times. Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney, eds. Faber and Faber, 1996. Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets. Maura Dooley, ed. Bloodaxe Books, 1997. Ruth Padel's Official Website (http://www.rpadel.dircon.co.uk/rp_main.htm). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.