Ruth Padel

Prize-winning poet, essayist, dramatist and actor Ramsey Nasr, born 1974 in Rotterdam into a Palestinian-Dutch family, was voted Poet Laureate of the Netherlands in 2009. A man of many passions, including classical music, drama, poetry and travel, as city poet of Antwerp in 2005 his appearances were ... (more)attended like pop concerts. Banipal’s publication of Heavenly Life, a collection of his poems translated by David Colmer, brings his work for the first time to an English-speaking audience. For poet Marilyn Hacker, ‘Ramsey Nasr is already a polyvalent literary figure in his own country and language – multi-faceted, virtuosic, irreverent and polymath. His poems, in every form and register from sonnet to Whitmanian tirade, do not balk at history, whether that of his family’s situation in the West Bank or the fate of Dutch Jewish musicians and Mahler’s music during the Nazi Occupation of the Netherlands – to name but two stopping points. Nasr will be in conversation with prizewinning British poet Ruth Padel, who has published seven poetry collections, a wide range of non-fiction, and a novel, Where the Serpent Lives. Tickets: £9 (£6 concessions and LRB subscribers - contact the shop for details) Book online at http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/events

Tickets £6.

Where the Serpent Lives is the striking debut novel from one of Britain's finest poets. Ruth Padel is also a brilliant nature writer, which informs this exciting and rich tapestry of love stories, intriguing science and relations with the animal world. Ruth reads and discusses her work with Eva Hoffman, ... (more)author of lyrical novels and studies including Lost in Translation, Shtetl, Illuminations and Time. Ruth Padel is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Zoological Society of London. She has won the National Poetry Competition and published seven collections, many of which have been shortlisted for Britain’s major poetry prizes. Her last poetry collection, Darwin: A Life in Poems, is a much-acclaimed biography through lyric poems of her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin.

Midnight and Other Poems, translated by Radwa Ashour, is the first major collection of Mourid Barghouti's poetry to be published in the UK. This remarkable Palestinian writer, best known to English-language readers for his autobiography I Saw Ramallah, which won the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Literature, ... (more)has spent many years in exile, and Midnight is a rich emotional montage of images of the land of his birth. He will read, then talk with Ruth Padel, whose latest book is Darwin: A Life in Poems. Barghouti and Padel will discuss translation, home and homelessness, here and away, language and landscape, self and other. All tickets £8 per event, available online or by calling +44 (0)20 7209 1141. Concessions: £5, for LRB subscribers, Friends of the British Museum, students and OAPs (concessions available from the Bookshop or by phone only). Supported by: * The British Museum * Arts Council England * The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize