Ruth Padel has been Writer in Residence at Somerset House since January. A Fellow both of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, Ruth has won a Cholmondeley Award and the National Poetry Competition; her six acclaimed poetry collections, including Rembrandt Would have Loved You and most recently The Soho Leopard, have been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. 

Her non-fiction includes two best-sellers on ways of reading contemporary poetry. The more recent of these, The Poem and the Journey (60 Poems for the Journey of Life), published in 2007, explores why we need poetry and how poems illuminate the private journey of our lives. While at Somerset House, she has finished a novel, Snakedance, which will come out next year, and begun a series of poems about the life and work of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin.

> read Ruth's latest poem

This spring, Ruth welcomed a number of guest poets to give a series of free lunchtime readings around a theme of poets' visions of London. The readings were presented by acclaimed poets Sean O'Brien, David Harsent, Daljit Nagra, Moniza Alvi, Lavinia Greenlaw and Ruth herself.

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