Ruth is the newly appointed Director of Arvon. She was formerly Head of Literature & Talks at Southbank Centre where she worked with the world’s finest writers, including Nobel Laureates Seamus Heaney, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, VS Naipaul, Harold Pinter and Derek Walcott.

Ruth was won over by Arvon when she went to Lumb Bank in 1997 to be tutored by Jenny Uglow and Hermione Lee.  At the time Ruth was working at Spread the Word, London’s literature development agency, recommending Arvon to would-be writers and she thought she should go to find out if it was all it was cracked up to be. It surpassed all expectations, and the experience still sings.

In the 1980s, Ruth lived in Australia and worked in the first bookshop there to stock gay books. (Yes, it is in living memory.)  She’s also worked as a commissioning editor, and is Poetry Editor for the journal Soundings, a board member of Wasafiri and on the steering committee of The Complete Works, a mentoring scheme for Black and Asian poets.

Ruth is a fan of Sharon Olds and is currently reading her new collection, One Secret Thing, which is so hot the pages burn. She’s also reading Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris as part of her ongoing project to read everything Bowen wrote, and is bowled over by the original imagination of Nam Lee in The Boat, his wonderful collection of short stories.