Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS (born 8 May 1946) is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author.

She studied Greek at the University of Oxford, where she sang in Schola Cantorum of Oxford, wrote a PhD thesis on ancient Greek poetry, and was a research fellow at Wadham College, which altered its statutes for her to allow female fellows. She taught Greek at Oxford, Cambridge and Birkbeck College, University of London, taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton University, and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she sang in the Choir of Église Saint-Eustache, and at the British School of Archaeology in Athens, for which she helped excavate the Royal Road at Knossos. In 1984, she left academia to write, and published a poetry pamphlet and first collection. She has served as trustee for Zoological Society of London and conservation charity New Networks for Nature, Chair of UK Poetry Society and Professor of Poetry, King's College London

Her parents were psychoanalyst John Hunter Padel and Hilda Barlow, daughter of Alan Barlow and Nora Barlow née Darwin, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, through whom Padel is Darwin's great-great-grandchild.

Padel has published thirteen poetry collections, won the UK National Poetry Competition, and been shortlisted five times for the T S Eliot and other UK prizes. Major themes are music, science, nature and wildlife, painting, history, migration (animal and human), and women's place in the world, most recently exploring myths woven around girls, the links between girlhood and nature, and the misogyny girls face. Her work often focusses on the journey as a "stepping stone to lyrical reflection on the human condition". Padel's 1996 to 2004 collections, mixed passionate love lyric with wide adventuring across the globe, but also challenged the supremacy of the male gaze at women and offered the female gaze instead. Described as an exquisite image-maker and love poet of intense lyricism, delicate skill, deep resonance and a wild generous imagination, she went on to elegiac poems exploring loss and bereavement. A meditation on the colour green, written after her mother's death, "guides us around the world in intense flights of geological and geographical fancy, excavating the truths and mysteries of grief". Stylistic hallmarks are said to be juxtaposition of the modern world with the ancient, technical skill and musicality; wit, passion, lyrical intelligence, internal and half-rhyme, enjambement and unusual energy within and against the line, 'As if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in." Quoted influences include Gerard Manley Hopkins and Greek choral lyric. From 1998 to 2004, Padel's collections reflect themes of simultaneously written non-fiction: music (I'm a Man – Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll); technical attention to the poetic line (52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, exemplified in poems such as 'Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfrieshire' her National Poetry Competition winner); and wildlife (Tigers in Red Weather). Three later collections, Darwin – A Life in Poems and The Mara Crossing (now updated to We Are All From Somewhere Else 2020), include prose; Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth (2014), with its resonant last line, 'Making is our defence against the dark,' has been called a meditation on conflict and history: especially of the Abrahamic religions. Tidings – A Christmas Journey addressed homelessness in her local London borough. Emerald (2018), a memoir and meditation on the poet's mother at her death, explored the alchemy of mourning and the renewing value of green. Her poetry biography of Beethoven, Beethoven Variations, was praised by the New York Times critic for taking him 'deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I’ve read, and her portrayal of Beethoven early on 'drifting into states that prefigured how deafness would increasingly isolate him.' Girl (2024) is 'A sensual exploration of female archetypes' and 'a spiritual quest through ancient mythology, mysticism, European fairytales and memory' that reminds us “there is always the question of power / and girl is a trajectory / of learning how to deal with it”.

Padel's collaboration with Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj, on Syrian refugees arriving on the Greek island of Lesbos, was performed on the first day of the Venice Biennale 2019. Tidings – A Christmas Journey (2016) dedicated to the Focus Homeless Outreach Team in Camden, North London, is described as an eloquent unsentimental narrative poem exploring homelessness and the meanings of Christmas today."The rough, apparently unmanageable contrast between child and tramp, hope and despair, gives the book its integrity. Padel's 2014 collection Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth collects poems going back twelve years reflecting keen interest in the Middle East, from her prize-winning poem on Pieter Bruegel's "The Triumph of Death", the 2002 Siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, to the title poem "Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth", which she has stated came from hearing Le Trio Joubran. She has held dialogues with Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, and written an Introduction to the posthumous poems of Mahmoud Darwish. Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth is said to have a 'magnificent central section on the Crucifixion,' and be steeped in the Middle East, Judaism, Christianity and Islam: "Padel is a poetic Daniel Barenboim, determined to arrive at some approximation of Middle Eastern harmony." Her innovative poems-and-prose volume The Mara Crossing (2012) revivified the prosimetrum, a medieval mix of poetry and prose, It addresses animal and human migration. and is described as a sweeping, experimental volume. Migrants, cellular, animal or human, migrate to survive; human migration is inextricable from trade, invasion, colonization and empire. "Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow's real home? And what does "native" mean if the English Oak is an immigrant from Spain?" One of her poems was used by the "Making It Home" project of the Refugee Survival Trust in Glasgow, which used poetry-based film-making to build bridges between groups of women of refugees and local women in Edinburgh.

Engaged in relating poetry and science, Padel has written on cell migration for The Scientist, was a judge for the 2012 Wellcome Trust Science Book Prize and the 2005 Aventis Science Prize for the Royal Society has written poems on genetics and zoology, and her book on migration is said to connect micro-level cell migration with macro-level social migration. An interest in combining poetry, science and religion is reflected in poems on genetics, debates on poetry and prayer with Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons and a residency at the Environment Institute, University College London. Her poems on Charles Darwin (2009) employ Darwin's writings, letters and journals in an unusual form of biography, addressing his life, family and science. They were received as innovative work by scientists and by the literary community as a "new species" of biography in verse, whose emotional centre is the Darwins' marriage, shaken by divergent religious belief and the death of a daughter. The book's staging by the Mephisto Stage Company, Ireland, was described as intensifying the musicality of the verse and dramatic interplay between the scientific and the spiritual that permeates this collection. Since Padel is a Darwin descendant, the book was also a family memoir. Her preface illuminates the role of Padel’s grandmother, Nora Barlow, who in editing Darwin's Autobiography restored a passage in which Darwin said he did not see how anyone could wish the doctrine of hell to be true; this had been deleted by the first editor, Darwin's son Francis, at his mother's request. Padel's poems connected Darwin's loss of his mother as a child with his passion for collecting; and linked his early scientific writing with his taxidermy teacher in Edinburgh John Edmonstone, a freed slave from Guiana.

Since 2013, Padel has written and performed sequences of poems on composers in conjunction with the Endellion String Quartet: first on Josef Haydn's Seven Last Words, which formed the central crucifixion section in her 2014 collection Learning to make an Oud in Nazareth; subsequently on Beethoven's late quartets and Schubert's Death and the Maiden. She was first Writer in Residence at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and is said to be a lifelong choral singer; she has presented Radio 3's programme "The Choir", has broadcast a series of BBC Radio 3 opera interval talks and has stated that if she could choose any other career it would be that of opera director. She has written on women's voices in opera and on a sixteenth-century madrigal for the London Review of Books, and in a Radio 3 essay series, Writers as Musicians, she spoke about playing viola, an instrument whose "inner voice" illustrates her Newcastle Poetry Lectures Silent Letters of the Alphabet. For BBC Radio 4 she has written and presented features on writers, scientists and composers including Hans Christian Andersen, Edward Elgar, Charles Darwin and W.S. Gilbert. On Desert Island Discs, her choices included Beethoven String Quartet Opus 132, Verdi's Requiem, "Down by the Salley Gardens" sung by Kathleen Ferrier, "I’m Ready for You" sung by Muddy Waters, a Cretan folksong and "The Boys from Piraeus", from the film Never on Sunday. Her luxury was a herd of deer. In 2020 she followed her 2009 poetry biography of Darwin with one of Beethoven, drawing on her musical childhood to create a poetry and prose mini-bio that 'tells the great composer’s life story more profoundly than most biographies.' 'A biography in verse of the great composer and a passionate highly personal account of how one creative genius can feed, and feed on, another.' 'An approach to Beethoven by way of precisely figured emotion. Two lives drawn beneath the lens, the composer's and her own, interacting in ways that can be bold and, finally, breathtaking. On the Eroica, she is spectacular. The composer is "fire-dust, gold-flight /winching upwards into pure light" as he drives "forward into a new-world dawn /thrilling with dissonance, calling up wild-steel angels"'(Times Literary Supplement) During the pandemic she recorded four podcasts on Beethoven's life, illustrated by her poems, and music played by pianist Karl Lutchmayer, the Endellion Quartet, soprano Nina Kanter and the South Asian Symphony Orchestra, for the Bangalore International Centre.

Padel's non-fiction began with Princeton University Press studies of ancient Greek drama and the mind. In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self explores the way Greek ideas of inwardness shaped European notions of the self. She used anthropology and psychoanalysis to support her thesis that male Greek culture spoke of the mind as mainly "female" and receptive rather than "male" and active. Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Madness in Greek and Other Tragedy investigates madness in tragedy from the Greeks to Shakespeare and the moderns, parsing different views of madness in different societies. She presented the tragic hero as embodiment of the human mind, 'which lives catastrophe, suffers damage and endures.'