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The surprise candidate and the household name still left in the race
12.05.09
The surprise candidate...
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Indian poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is a surprise candidate and outsider for the Oxford post.
A poet and literary critic, Mehrotra, 62, who was born in Lahore, is professor of English at the University of Allahabad, where he has taught since 1968. He has held visiting writer posts at universities around the world.
The author of four collections to date, he is supported by writers including Tariq Ali, Amit Chaudhuri and Toby Litt, and was described by one of his nominators, Oxford English lecturer Peter D McDonald, as “one of the finest poets working in any language”, and “a poet-critic of an exceptionally high order”.
The journal Fulcrum said his poems were “coded messages from the unconscious, but [that] there is an exceedingly conscious hand that crafts them”.
And the household name still left in the race
The 63-year-old former chair of the Poetry Society is the only household name left in the field.
A great-great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, she has vowed to make links between poetry and science if elected.
Padel was born in Wimpole Street and is the daughter of a psychoanalyst.
She studied classics at Oxford where she wrote a doctorate on Greek tragedy before moving on to universities in Paris and Berlin. She has taught at Oxford, Cambridge, London and Princeton.
In 1985 she gave up academic tenure to write poetry full time. Her subjects include her own life, science and even a study of tigers.
“I have close links with people in zoology and astrophysics there [at Oxford] and would love to get poetry combining with them,” she said in a recent interview in which she declared her interest in the Oxford post.
“I guess I value the anarchicness of the Oxford post. There are hundreds of chairs of poetry these days, in creative writing departments everywhere.
“However, they are all tied into teaching, filling in forms, meeting targets. The Oxford post is what you make of it.”
Her work has been nominated for both the TS Eliot and the Whitbread prizes. She is a fellow of the Zoological Society of London and this year was the first poet in residence at Somerset House.
Her most recent book, Darwin: A Life in Poems, tells her great-great grandfather's biography in poems.
