Ruth Padel is a prize-winning poet, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, author of the internationally acclaimed Darwin - A Life in Poems, a lyric biography of Charles Darwin; a first novel Where the Serpent Lives, praised in Britain and India especially for its nature writing; and Tigers in Red Weather, a travel-memoir featuring tiger conservation.

Ruth has published seven poetry collections and presents Poetry Workshop, a new Radio 4 series on writing and reading poems. She has written and presented a series of five-part programmes on 19th century thinkers and writers from Darwin and Elgar to Tennyson, Hans Andersen 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. Her forthcoming collection The Mara Crossing will explore animal and human migration from cells to souls. See www.ruthpadel.com