Ruth Padel is a poet, prose-writer, critic and broadcaster based in London. Fittingly, with great-great-grandparents including a concert pianist and Charles Darwin, her interests encompass zoology, natural history and travel, as well as music and classical Greek. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Her first collection of poetry was the pamphlet Alibi (1985); subsequent collections include The Soho Leopard (2004), Darwin: a life in Poems (Vintage, 2010) and The Mara Crossing – poems and prose on migration (Chatto & Windus, 2012).
Her non-fiction includes the collection of her Independent articles on reading individual poems, 52 Ways of Looking At A Poem (2002), and The Poem and the Journey (2007).