Ruth Padel

Standard Name: Padel, Ruth
Birth Name: Ruth Sofia Padel
Married Name: Ruth Burnyeat
RP is a contemporary writer who came late to publishing poetry, after a career as a classical scholar who wrote on Greek literature and feminist theory. She is also a career journalist and reviewer, and has published successful poetry anthologies of popularizing or educative intent, as well as introductions to works by others and an unusual travel memoir.
Slightly blurry, half-length photograph of Ruth Padel in Crete, smiling with her arms crossed, wearing a dark jacket. a bright blue scarf, and gold earrings. Her hair is shoulder-length, curly, and rather wild. In front is a colourful length of woven fabric.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Kate Clanchy
While the family was in Edinburgh, KC 's mother, Joan Clanchy , was the Headmistress of St George's School for Girls (which numbers Ménie Muriel Dowie among its distinguished former students).
Scott, Jane. “By Virtue Of An Explosive Arts Debut”. The Herald, 30 Dec. 1996.
When KC 's...
Friends, Associates Elaine Feinstein
While she was teaching at Essex, EF met a number of poets, including Ed Dorn , who fed her interest in American poetry. She was also involved during these years with a group including Tom Pickard
Intertextuality and Influence Elaine Feinstein
Home in this collection opens, Where is that I wonder? It then evokes comfortable, elegant settings of both childhood and adult life, and also a place where the poet awakes from dreaming of her dead...
Literary responses Elaine Feinstein
Alan Brownjohn wrote of this collection (which centres around cities Feinstein has visited or which figure in her family's history) that the poems are mainly brief and simple, but they carry the authority of experience...
Literary responses Elaine Feinstein
EF herself calls this a complex, many-voiced book with a dark secret at its heart.
Feinstein, Elaine. It Goes with the Territory. Alma, 2013.
245
Ruth Padel , reviewing it for the New Statesman, found it beautifully plotted but remained convinced nonetheless that...
Literary responses Anne Carson
Richly appreciative comments on this book became quickly available for reproducing on the paperback edition in one of the more impressive roster of blurbs you are ever likely to see.
Anderson, Sam. “The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson”. New York Times Magazine, 14 Mar. 2013, p. 20.
Ruth Padel wrote: Carson writes...
Literary responses Carol Ann Duffy
Ruth Padel in the TLS celebrated CAD 's political-erotic challenge.
qtd. in
Duffy, Carol Ann. Selected Poems. Penguin, 1994.
152
This book won her a second Scottish Arts Council Book Award and a Dylan Thomas Award.
Duffy, Carol Ann. Selected Poems. Penguin, 1994.
prelims
Rees-Jones, Deryn. Carol Ann Duffy. Northcote House, 1999.
x
Literary responses Carol Ann Duffy
Patrick McGuinness in the London Review of Books remarked on CAD 's ability to get into any shape she likes,
McGuinness, Patrick. “Get rid of time and everything’s dancing”. London Review of Books, 5 Oct. 2000, pp. 15-6.
15
creating a different voice for each of her different characters. In these poems, he...
Literary responses Helen Dunmore
Ruth Padel , judging the competition, pronounced this poem to be completely arresting.
qtd. in
Crown, Sarah. “A Life in Writing”. The Guardian, 24 Apr. 2010, pp. Review 12 - 13.
Review 12
The win (especially gratifying to Dunmore because of the anonymity of entries) encouraged her into work on a new...
Literary responses Helen Dunmore
Fellow-poet Ruth Padel called Hold out your armsquietly sensual and subtle at the same time, luminous and utterly gentle.
Kean, Danuta, and Helen Dunmore. “Helen Dunmore’s family reveal poem written in the author’s last days”. theguardian.com, 6 June 2017.
Literary responses Helen Dunmore
Once again the chorus of appreciation was led by her fellow poets. Kate Clanchy called her a particularly lucid writer, and not simply because her poems are so often filled with the play of light...
Occupation Alice Oswald
This was ten years after the fiasco in which Ruth Padel was elected, but resigned nine days later in face of controversy over her part in spreading the allegation that one of the other (male)...
Occupation Elaine Feinstein
EF 's introduction to Russian literature, which set her seriously reading and then translating Russian authors, significantly influenced her thinking.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
14
Since 1972 she has earned her living as a writer. She has lectured for...
Textual Features Anne Carson
Then after some appendices (further traces of the world of scholarship) and a poem by Emily Dickinson , Carson begins her radical modern adaptation and expansion of Geryon's story. He is now a little boy...
Textual Features Carol Ann Duffy
Many poems here feature women answering back to canonical male voices: Liz Lochhead to Donne , Jenny Joseph to W. S. Gilbert , U. A. Fanthorpe to Walt Whitman , Wendy Cope to A. E. Housman

Timeline

16 June 2003: A BBC television quiz programme, The Professionals...

Writing climate item

16 June 2003

A BBC television quiz programme, The Professionals (successor to University Challenge), which pits against each other teams of journalists, meteorologists, psychiatrists or whatever, fielded a team of poets.
“Poetry Society News: News Archive”. The Poetry Society, London.

14 May 2013: The Zoological Society of London (better...

Writing climate item

14 May 2013

The Zoological Society of London (better known as the London Zoo ) launched a series of Writers Talks, in which a professuonal writer joined with a scientist and a zoo-keeper to talk about a particular...

Texts

Padel, Ruth. “’Imagery of the Elsewhere’ Two Choral Odes of Euripides”. Classical Quarterly, Vol.
24
, No. 2, Cambridge University Press, 1974, pp. 227-41.
Padel, Ruth, editor. 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem; or, How reading modern poetry can change your life. Chatto and Windus, 2002.
Padel, Ruth. Alibi. Many Press, 1985.
Padel, Ruth. Angel. Bloodaxe, 1993.
Padel, Ruth. “Between Theory and Fiction: Reflections on Feminism and Classical Scholarship”. Gender & History, Vol.
2
, No. 2, pp. 198-11.
Padel, Ruth. Darwin: A Life in Poems. Chatto and Windus, 2009.
Padel, Ruth. Emerald. Chatto and Windus, 2018.
Padel, Ruth. Fusewire. Chatto and Windus, 1996.
Padel, Ruth. “George Steiner and the Greekness of Tragedy”. Reading George Steiner, edited by Ronald A. Sharp and Nathan A., Jr Scott, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, pp. 99-133.
Padel, Ruth. “How and Why”. Contemporary Women’s Poetry, edited by Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones, Macmillan Press; St Martin’s Press, 2000, pp. 12-17.
Padel, Ruth. I’m a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock’n’Roll. Faber and Faber, 2000.
Padel, Ruth. In and Out of the Mind. Princeton University Press, 1992.
Padel, Ruth. Indian Red. Turret Bookshop, 1992.
Padel, Ruth. “It’s over”. The Guardian, p. Review 19.
Padel, Ruth. Learning to Make an Oudh in Nazareth. Chatto, 2014.
Padel, Ruth. “Poetry has a responsibility to look at the world”. The Guardian.
Padel, Ruth. Rembrandt Would Have Loved You. Chatto and Windus, 1998.
Padel, Ruth. “Seeing Red”. The New York Times.
Padel, Ruth. Summer Snow. Hutchinson, 1990.
Padel, Ruth. The Mara Crossing. Vintage Chatto and Windus, 2012.
Padel, Ruth, editor. The Poem and the Journey. Chatto and Windus, 2007.
Padel, Ruth. The Soho Leopard. Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Padel, Ruth. Tigers in Red Weather. Little, Brown, 2005.
Padel, Ruth. Voodoo Shop. Chatto and Windus, 2002.
Padel, Ruth. Whom Gods Destroy. Princeton University Press, 1995.