Ruth Padel has published seven poetry collections. Her latest, Darwin: A Life in Poems, is a biography through lyric poems of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin. Her non-fiction includes a study of rock music and Greek myth, two studies of Greek tragedy and the mind, and a nature book tracing her journeys in search of tigers in Bhutan, Nepal, Laos, Sumatra, Russia, China and India. Her books on reading modern poetry, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey, came out of her weekly column in The Independent on Sunday. She gave the Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures at Newcastle University in 2008, published as Silent Letters of the Alphabet (Bloodaxe Books, 2010). In 2009, drawing on her work in tropical conservation, she published her first novel, Where the Serpent Lives.