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About this event

The Mara Crossing is Ruth Padel’s collection of poems and prose. It puts human migration into the context of biology and history, myth and politics. During this special IMI seminar, she will discuss the themes of the book, and read poems and prose on images of migration from cells in our body to plants across the globe, and birds and mammals, from the Holy Family as patron saints of asylum-seekers on their “Flight into Egypt,” to G4S, the UK Border Agency and British strategies for detention and forced deportation. Her central image, the crossing of the crocodile-filled Mara River by thousands of wildebeest at the end of the longest mammal migration, becomes an image for the struggle of all migrants.

A prodigy, a book of wonders.
 - Independent
A sweeping and unconventional book about migration which calls for compassion: a lyrical tribute to the instincts and whims that catalyse movement.
- Economist

About the speaker

Ruth Padel is a British poet and writer. She is the author of a wide range of non-fiction, most recently The Mara Crossing, poems and prose on migration. She began as a Greek scholar at Oxford, has written books on consciousness and self in ancient Greece, on reading contemporary poetry, and on tiger conservation. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Council Member of the Zoological Society of London.

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