Arvind Mehrotra loses Oxford's Professor of Poetry election

Prasun Sonwalkar

London, May 17 (PTI) Noted Indian poet Arvind Mehrotra,
who was contesting the election for the prestigious post of
Professor of Poetry at the Oxford University, has lost to Ruth
Padel, great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin.

Mehrotra's prospects had brightened by the withdrawal of
Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott, but during the
election Saturday he polled 129 votes against Padel's 297.
Oxford graduates and staff were entitled to vote for the
five-year post.

Padel, an Oxford alumni who will succeed Christopher
Ricks, has become the first female to achieve the honour since
the post was created in 1708.

"It is tremendous that May 2009 has seen the election of
the first woman Professor of Poetry at Oxford and the first
woman Poet Laureate. Ruth Padel will be a dynamic and
distinguished Professor, and we are very pleased to welcome
her," said Sally Mapstone, Chair of the English Faculty Board.

Padel's participation in seminars for the Euroscience
Forum Barcelona, the Royal Society and Royal Society of
Medicine, and the series of poems on famous naturalist Charles
Darwin 'Darwin A Life in Poems', which was published this
year, has drawn unanimous accolades.

Padel said: "I feel honoured and humbled to be given this
responsibility, and shall try to carry it out as well as I
can. My backers based their support for me on what they felt I
could offer poetry and students. Now I shall do my best to
fulfill their trust".

Mehrotra has held visiting writer posts at universities
around the world and the journal Fulcrum said his poems were
"coded messages from the unconscious, but [that] there is an
exceedingly conscious hand that crafts them".

The author of four collections was backed 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".
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