Ruth Padel is an award-winning British poet, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Council Member of the Zoological Society of London. “Shell” will appear in her tenth collection in 2014: Learning to make an Oud in Nazareth, whose title poem was published in The New Yorker. Her most recent UK collection, The Mara Crossing, is a blend of prose and poems on migration: from cells to souls, including apple trees, jellyfish, birds, the beginnings of human civilization and the mass migrations now happening because of economic and environmental destruction and war. It will be published in US by Counterpoint Press as On Migration: Dangerous Journeys and the Living World. She is also known for her acclaimed non-fiction, such as Tigers In Red Weather, her memoir of exploring Asian forests to understand wild tiger conservation, and her first novel, Where the Serpent Lives: “Evocative depictions of life in the fast-degrading forests of India. An almost apocalyptic picture of the ways in which the world’s wild animals are being endangered not only by the greed of criminals but also by the peasant’s desperate search for sustenance in economies interested only in development.” Independent
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