Padel is the eldest child of the psychoanalyst John Hunter Padel (a descendant of the surgeon John Hunter) and his wife Hilda Horatia Barlow, daughter of Sir Alan Noel Barlow, 2nd Baronet and his wife Nora Darwin. Through her maternal grandmother she is a great-great-grand-daughter of naturalist Charles Darwin. She was born in the top floor of the family house in Wimpole Street where the medical practice of her great-grandfather Thomas Barlow had been located.

Padel attended the North London Collegiate School, before studying classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. 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 taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton University and myth in Buenos Aires. She lived in Greece and Crete for several years, has excavated Minoan tombs on Crete, and 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.

Padel has published seven poetry collections and has said the pivotal moment in her career as poet came after her daughter was born and her first pamphlet of poems Alibi was on the point of publication After Alibi, was published by The Many Press in 1985 she left academia and supported herself by reviewing for newspapers including The Independent, The Times, Financial Times and The New York Times. Her first full-length collection, Summer Snow, 1990, draws on her knowledge of ancient Greece especially Crete. Science and history have underpinned her poetry and prose from the beginning. In Mumbai in 2010 she read at the Bombay Natural History Society and Prithvi Theatre on science, nature writing, and tiger conservation. ::::: Prithvi Theatre ::::: Padel’s lyrical biography of Charles Darwin covered his science, family and life, not continuously but in ‘snapshots, epiphanies, symbolic fragments, what the 17th-century poets might have called emblems’, noted as innovative wok, with '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.’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.

Style

Critics and reviewers characterize her work as lyrical, musical 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".She specializes in enjambement, internal rhyme and half-rhyme 'to beautiful song-like effect’. Her prose work 'Tigers in Red Weather' was received well for its perspectives on tiger conservation but also for its nature writing and her novel Where the Serpent Lives likewise was praised for its wildlife writing and the way it blended poetry and science. It is claimed that as a poet, she '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’.

Poetry

Padel has published seven collections. 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. Through the late 1990s and 2000s, she wrote three poetry collections shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize, Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Voodoo Shop and The Soho Leopard, while working on three other books: 'I’m a Man- Sex, Gods and Rock ‘n’ Roll', '52 Ways of Looking At A Poem' and her conservation volume 'Tigers in Red Weather'; concerns from all these books turn up in poems from these years. Her poem '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.

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.

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.

Other Non-Fiction

Padel is unique in being a Fellow of Zoological Society of London as well as Royal Society of Literature She has also had numerous non-fiction books to her name, covering subjects as diverse as rock music and Greek tragedy. 'In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self' written for the classicist and general reader, 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, she analyzes tragedy's metaphors for what lies within. Central to her discussion is tragedy's perennial question, how and why all human beings, female and 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 ‘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.

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.

Fiction

Her short stories have been published by the Comma Press, in the Dublin Review , London Magazine and Prospect Magazine and broadcast on Radio 3.Padel's first novel, "Where the Serpent Lives", was set in forests of India and Devon, and also London over the 2005 bombings.

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.

Broadcasting

Padel has said that if she could choose any other career, it would be that of opera director. She has written and broadcast extensively on opera and music. My other life: Ruth Padel | Books | The Observer 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 broadcast diverse programmes for BBC Radio 3, including a series of 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 Andersen, Edward Elgar and Charles Darwin, as well as her own short stories. In January 2009, as guest on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4. Her music choices were Recordare from the Requiem 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, a herd of deer, was disallowed on the grounds of no live animals. Instead she chose paper and pencils.