London Poetry Award Nomination Ruth Padel: '[on The Mara Crossing] .. a vertiginous compendium, a prodigy, a book of wonders: it is Montaigne's and Darwin's 21st-century child. "Migration is part of the restless... self-renewing nature of all life, in creative tension between the fixed and the wandering."'

Independent: 'The Mara Crossing is a vertiginous compendium, a prodigy, a book of wonders: it is Montaigne's and Darwin's 21st-century child. "Migration is part of the restless... self-renewing nature of all life, in creative tension between the fixed and the wandering."'

Guardian: 'Ruth Padel has described herself as a writer "formed by the 19th century". "There's something about the mindset of that time: a curiosity, a desire to make links. It appeals to me deeply." The Mara Crossing – a broad-ranging meditation on all things migratory – is certainly concerned with the making of links. But it's also about drawing distinctions, or, more precisely, walking a nervous line between these impulses. Bifurcation – between poetry and prose, human and animal, privilege and under-privilege, and, crucially, art and science – is at the heart of the collection and powers its explorations of journeying. This is a book of raw interfaces and unnerving encounters, not comfortable oppositions of black and white.'

Ruth is a London-based British poet and writer, author of the lyric biography Darwin – A Life in Poems and Tigers in Red Weather, a first-hand account of tiger conservation. She has published eight poetry collections, a novel, and eight non-fiction works including several much-loved books on reading poetry. She is a well-known radio broadcaster and currently presents Poetry Workshop, a landmark BBC 4 series of programmes on writing poems.

Ruth is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Zoological Society of London, and a Bye-Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Her awards include First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition, a Cholmondeley Award from The Society of Authors, an Arts Council of England Writers’ Award, and a British Council Darwin Now Research Award for her novel Where the Serpent Lives. Her new book The Mara Crossing is an innovative meditation on migration – both animal and human – in both poems and prose.