Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet and writer, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Council Member of the Zoological Society of London, author of the internationally acclaimed Darwin - A Life in Poems, a lyric biography of Charles Darwin, Tigers in Red Weather, on tiger conservation, and most recently The Mara Crossing, a ground-breaking meditation, in poetry and prose, on all aspects of migration, micro and macro: from cells to animals, human beings to human souls. 

Ruth has published eight poetry collections and presents Poetry Workshop, a new Radio 4 series on writing and reading poems: the next series will air in November 2012. She has written and presented a series of five-part programmes on 19th century thinkers and writers from Darwin and Elgar to Tennyson and W S Gilbert. She trained as a Greek scholar and has written several much-loved books on reading contemporary poetry, two books on ideas of the mind and madness in Greek tragedy (published by Princeton University Press) and I’m A Man (Faber & Faber) a study of the masculinity of rock music and Greek myth. See www.ruthpadel.com.