Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, known for her poetic explorations of migration, both animal and human, and her involvement with classical music, wildlife conservation and Greece, ancient and modern. She is Trustee for conservation charity New Networks for Nature, has served on the board of the Zoological Society of London and was Professor of Poetry at King's College London from 2013 to 2022. Biography Padel is daughter of psychoanalyst John Hunter Padel and Hilda Barlow, daughter of Sir Alan Barlow 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, mathematician Martin T. 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 as the first Bowra Research Fellow at Wadham College Oxford, which altered its Statutes for her to accommodate female Fellows, was 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 studied at the Sorbonne 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. She then left academe to support herself by reviewing and publish her first collection (1990). From 1984 to 2000 she was married to philosopher Myles Burnyeat. From 2014 to 2022 she was Professor of Poetry at King's College London. Books Fiction Where the Serpent Lives 2010 Daughters of the Labyrinth 2021 Poetry Alibi 1985 Summer Snow 1990 Angel 1993 Fusewire 1996 Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Shortlisted for T S Eliot Prize, 1998 Voodoo Shop, Shortlisted for Whitbread Prize and T S Eliot Prize, 2002 The Soho Leopard, Shortlisted for T S Eliot Prize, 2004 Darwin – A Life in Poems, Shortlisted for Costa Prize, 2009 The Mara Crossing, Shortlisted for Ted Hughes Award, 2012 Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth, Shortlisted for T S Eliot Prize, 2014 Tidings – A Christmas Journey