Travel Book Award 2005 Judge for Royal Society Aventis Prize for Science Books 2006 Arts Council of England Individual Writer’s Bursary 2008 First Writer in Residence at Somerset House, London 2008–9 Inaugurated Writers' Talks at the Courtauld Institute of Art. 2009 Judge for National Poetry Competition 2009 Leverhulme Artist in Residence Award at Christ's College, Cambridge 2009 Opened Edinburgh International Book Festival reading from Darwin – A Life in Poems 2009 Elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University 2009 British Council Darwin Now Award 2009 Read, talked on Darwin at University of Havana, Poetry Society of America in Lillian Vernon House, New York, and New York Botanical Garden. 2009 Darwin – A Life in Poems shortlisted for Costa Book Awards for poetry 2010 Read on conservation, nature and environment in Mumbai, at Bombay Natural History Society and Prithvi Theatre. 2010–2011 Writer in Residence at the Environment Institute, University College London 2010 Chair of Judges for Forward Poetry Prize 2010 Curated "Writing the Family" events for Edinburgh International Book Festival 2010 Judge for Poetry for 2010 Costa Book Awards 2011 Inaugurated 'Poetry Workshop' on BBC Radio 4 2012 The Mara Crossing nominated for London Poetry Awards and shortlisted for Ted Hughes Prize 2012 Judge for the 2012 Wellcome Trust Science Book Prize. 2013 Appointed to teach Creative Writing, King's College London 2014 First Writer in Residence, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden 2014 Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth shortlisted for T. S. Eliot Prize 2015 Performed at Jaipur Literary Festival 2015 Read at International Literature Festival Berlin 2016 Judge for International Man Booker Prize 2016 Chair of Judges for T. S. Eliot Prize 2016 Performed at Times of India Festival Mumbai 2016 Performed Tidings – A Christmas Journey at Ely, in conversation with former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams 2016 Performed Tidings in the Round Church Holy Sepulchre, Cambridge, in the Cambridge Literary Festival 2017 Performed at Jaipur Literature Festival 2019 Inaugurated Jaipur Literary Festival with two poems, on Jaipur and on the world's first cell Oxford Professor of Poetry Padel was the first woman to be elected Oxford Professor of Poetry - in 2009, with 297 votes. (Predecessors James Fenton and Christopher Ricks were elected on 228 and 214 votes; online voting now allows wider participation.) She was elected in a media storm, triggered by photocopied pages from a university publication describing sexual harassment charges against her rival Derek