Prize, in 2011 delivered the Housman Lecture at the Hay Festival on "The Name and Nature of Poetry," and inaugurated Radio 4's Poetry Workshop, a series of programmes on writing poetry in which she led workshops with poetry groups across the UK. Her books on reading poetry and the column from which they grew influenced a decade of writing about poetry in the UK, followed by her Newcastle University 'Bloodaxe' Lectures on poetry's use of silence, Silent Letters of the Alphabet. Her criticism is reported to employ close analysis, knowledge of Greek poetics, myth, metaphor, tone and rhyme; she is said to read with aural acuity, generosity and no polemic; her precision "does not obscure but builds the big picture", addressing the general reader but with "utmost attention to the page". She has written introductions to the works of Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti and Ramsey Nasr, and British poets Walter Ralegh, Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins. At the opening festival of the T S Eliot Festival at Little Gidding in 2006, 70 years after Eliot's visit there, Padel described the contrast between Eliot's memories of Little Gidding and his experience of The Blitz whilst writing the poem. "It reminded him there was still a place that had a sense of truth." She returned to this moment in her foreword to the posthumous volume of Mahmoud Darwish, comparing his sense of the poet's role in a time of violence to that of Seamus Heaney in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and of Eliot during the London blitz. Awards and appointments 1992 Wingate Scholarship 1993 Angel Poetry Book Society Recommendation 1994 Arts Council Writers' Award for poetry collection Fusewire 1996 First Prize, UK National Poetry Competition 1996 Judge for T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize 1998 Rembrandt Would Have Loved You Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for T. S. Eliot Prize 1998 Appointed Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature 1999 Judge for National Poetry Competition 2000 Cholmondeley Award from Society of Authors 2002 Poet in Residence for the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts in 2002. 2002 Voodoo Shop Poetry Book Society Recommendation, short-listed for T. S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award 2003 Research Award from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 2004 The Soho Leopard Poetry Book Society Choice, short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2005 Tigers in Red Weather shortlisted in USA for Kiriyama Prize and in UK for Dolman Best