Ruth Padel

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Ruth Padel bigraphy, stories - British poet and author

Ruth Padel : biography

08 May 1946 –

Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS ( ) (born 8 May 1946) is a British poet, a non-fiction author known also for her poetry criticism, nature writing and connections with science, music and conservation (she is on the Board of the Zoological Society of London),Triumph tastes trifle sour. Reg Little. The Oxford Times. 21 May 2009. and more recently a novelist.. BBC Today. Luke Wright and Ruth Padel She broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 and 4 on poetry, literature, music and wildlife and presents Poetry Workshop, a Radio 4 series in which she works with local poetry groups across the UKhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ntrbz

Non-fiction

Scholarship and Greek myth

Padel’s non-fiction began with books for Princeton University Press on ancient Greece. In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self explores the way Greek ideas of inwardness shaped European notions of the self. She used anthropology and psychoanalysis to support her thesis that male Greek culture spoke of the mind as mainly "female" and receptive rather than "male" and active. Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Madness in Greek and Other Tragedy investigates madness in tragedy from the Greeks to Shakespeare and the moderns, parsing different views of madness in different societies. She presented the tragic hero as embodiment of the human mind, ‘which lives catastrophe, suffers damage and endures.’

Her subsequent work I’m A Man: Sex, Gods and Rock ‘n’ Roll(2000) argued that rock music began as a ‘wishing well of masculinity,’ which drew on mythic connections between male sexuality, aggression, anxiety, misogyny and violence which derived from Ancient Greece. Padel has stated that she intended this to focus on women’s voices but then felt she ought first to pick apart the maleness of rock music. The book had a mixed reception from male reviewers. Women reviewers described it as original, beautifully expressed, vivid, amusing and convincing; Rock writers Charles Shaar Murray and Casper Llewellyn Smith described it as ‘provocative and fascinating’ and her analysis of rock’s misogyny ‘dazzling.’

Nature writing: wildlife and conservation

Padel is a Member of the Council of the Zoological Society of London; http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/tales-from-the-stave-radio-4-tuesdaybrthe-essay-radio-3-mondaywednesday-2205535.html and an Ambassador for the UK’s New Networks for Nature, an alliance of practitioners in different fields who celebrate and draw creative inspiration from Britain’s nature and wildlife.http://www.newnetworksfornature.org.uk/ambassadors.htm, http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/history/news/n3.aspx Her account of wild tiger conservation, drawing on her scientific background and Darwinian descent, was valued internationally for its insights on conservation, for its travel writing. with introductions to little-known parts of the world such as Sumatra, Bhutan and Ussuriland, its ear for dialogue, the quality of nature writing, and portrait of both the tiger and the field-zoologist.

Biography

Padel is daughter of psychoanalyst John Hunter Padel and Hilda, daughter of Sir (James) Alan Noel Barlow 2nd Baronet and Nora Barlow, née Darwin, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, through whom Padel is Darwin’s great-great-grandchild. Her brother is historian Oliver Padel; cousins include prison reformer Una Padel, sculptor Phyllida Barlow and biographer Randal Keynes, her uncle is Horace Barlow. Padel was born in Wimpole Street where her great-grandfather Sir Thomas Barlow practised medicine.. She attended North London Collegiate School, studied classics at Lady Margaret Hall Oxford where she sang in Schola Cantorum of Oxford, wrote a PhD on Greek poetry, and was first Bowra Research Fellow at Wadham College Oxford which altered its Statutes for her to accommodate female Fellows. She was thus among the first women to become Fellows of formerly all-male Oxford colleges. She taught Greek at Oxford and Birkbeck, University of London, taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton University, has lived extensively in Greece, and in Paris where she sang in the Choir of Église Saint-Eustache, Paris. Her publishing career began in 1985, while she was teaching Greek at Birkbeck College, with a poetry pamphlet. Later she left academe to support herself by reviewing and publish her first collection, 1990.Ruth Padel profile: From teaching Greek to poetry’s peak. Guardian Unlimited. 17 May 2009. She was married to philosopher Myles Burnyeat.