Sir Andrew Motion (born 26 October 1952) is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.

Early life

thumb|left|[[Radley College]]

Motion was born on 26 October 1952 in London, to (Andrew) Richard Michael Motion (1921-2006), a brewer at Ind Coope, and (Catherine) Gillian (née Bakewell; 1928–1978).

As a child, Motion lived in Kimpton, Hertfordshire, and then in Hatfield Heath. He attended primary school in Much Hadham, before attending boarding school at Maidwell Hall from the age of seven, at Stisted, near Braintree in Essex, where Richard Motion's grandparents had previously lived at Stisted Hall, by that time converted into a home for the elderly.

When Motion was 17 years old, his mother had a horse-riding accident and suffered a serious head injury requiring a lifesaving neurosurgery operation. She regained some speech, but she was severely paralysed and remained in and out of coma for nine years. She died in 1978 and her husband died of cancer in 2006. Motion has said that he wrote to keep his memory of his mother alive. When Motion was about 18 years old, he moved away from the village to study English at University College, Oxford; His 1993 biography of Larkin, which won the Whitbread Prize for Biography, was responsible for bringing about a substantial revision of Larkin's reputation.

Motion was editorial director and poetry editor at Chatto & Windus (1983–89); he edited the Poetry Society's Poetry Review from 1980 to 1982 and succeeded Malcolm Bradbury as professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia. He wanted to write "poems about things in the news, and commissions from people or organisations involved with ordinary life", rather than be seen as a "courtier". So, he wrote "for the TUC about liberty, about homelessness for the Salvation Army, about bullying for ChildLine, about the foot and mouth outbreak for the Today programme, about the Paddington rail disaster, the 11 September attacks and Harry Patch for the BBC, and more recently about shell shock for the charity Combat Stress, and climate change for the song cycle he finished for Cambridge University with Peter Maxwell Davies." and in 2005, "Spring Wedding" in honour of the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Camilla Parker Bowles. Commissioned to write in the honour of 109-year-old Harry Patch, the last surviving "Tommy" to have fought in the First World War, Motion composed a five-part poem, read and received by Patch at the Bishop's Palace in Wells in 2008.

As laureate, he also founded the Poetry Archive, an on-line library of historic and contemporary recordings of poets reciting their own work.

Motion remarked that he found some of the duties attendant to the post of poet laureate difficult and onerous and that the appointment had been "very, very damaging to [his] work". The appointment of Motion met with criticism from some quarters. As he prepared to stand down from the job, Motion published an article in The Guardian that concluded: "To have had 10 years working as laureate has been remarkable. Sometimes it's been remarkably difficult, the laureate has to take a lot of flak, one way or another. More often it has been remarkably fulfilling. I'm glad I did it, and I'm glad I'm giving it up – especially since I mean to continue working for poetry."

Motion spent his last day as Poet Laureate holding a creative writing class at his alma mater, Radley College, before giving a poetry reading and thanking Peter Way, the man who taught him English at Radley, for making him who he was. Carol Ann Duffy succeeded him as Poet Laureate on 1 May 2009.

Post-laureateship

Motion is chairman of the Arts Council of England's literature panel (appointed 1996) and is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Since July 2009, Motion has been Chairman of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) appointed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. He is also a vice-president of the Friends of the British Library, a charity which provides funding support to the British Library. He was knighted in the 2009 Queen's Birthday Honours list. and in March 2010, he announced that he was working with publishers Jonathan Cape on a sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Entitled Silver, the story is set a generation on from the original book and was published in March 2012. In July 2010, Motion returned to Kingston-upon-Hull for the annual Humber Mouth literature festival and taking part in the Larkin 25 festival commemorating the 25th anniversary of Philip Larkin's death. In his capacity as Larkin's biographer and as a former lecturer in English at the University of Hull, Motion named an East Yorkshire Motor Services bus Philip Larkin. Motion's debut play Incoming, about the war in Afghanistan, premièred at the High Tides Festival in Halesworth, Suffolk, in May 2011. Motion also featured in Jamie's Dream School in 2011 as the poetry teacher.

In June 2012, he became the President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. In March 2014, he was elected an Honorary Fellow at Homerton College, Cambridge.

Motion won the 2015 Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry for the radio programme Coming Home. The production featured poetry by Motion based on recordings he made of British soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2017, Motion moved to Baltimore, Maryland, to take up a post at the Writing Seminars as a Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University.

Work

Motion has said of himself: "My wish to write a poem is inseparable from my wish to explain something to myself." His work combines lyrical and narrative aspects in a "postmodern-romantic sensibility". Motion has won the Arvon Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Eric Gregory Award, Whitbread Prize for Biography and the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Motion took part in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty-Six Books, writing and performing a piece based upon a book of the King James Bible.

Personal life

Motion's marriage to Joanna Powell ended in 1983. He was married to Jan Dalley from 1985 to 2009, divorcing after a seven-year separation. They had one son born in 1986 and twins, a son and a daughter, born in 1988. In 2010, he married Kyeong-Soo Kim. He currently lives part of the year in Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States.

Selected honours and awards

  • 1975: won the Newdigate prize for Oxford undergraduate poetry
  • 1976: Eric Gregory Award
  • 1981: wins Arvon Foundation's International Poetry Competition with The Letter
  • 1984: John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for Dangerous Play: Poems 1974–1984
  • 1987: Somerset Maugham Award for The Lamberts
  • 1987: Dylan Thomas Prize for Natural Causes
  • 1999: appointed Poet Laureate for ten years
  • 1994: Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, Whitbread Prize for Biography
  • 2009: Knight Bachelor
  • 2014: Wilfred Owen Poetry Award

Bibliography

Poetry collections

  • 1978: The Pleasure Steamers, Carcanet
  • 1981: Independence, Salamander Press
  • 1983: Secret Narratives, Salamander Press
  • 1984: Dangerous Play: Poems 1974–1984, Salamander Press / Penguin
  • 1987: Natural Causes, Chatto & Windus
  • 1988: Two Poems, Words Ltd
  • 1991: Love in a Life, Faber and Faber
  • 1994: The Price of Everything, Faber and Faber
  • 1997: Salt Water, Faber and Faber
  • 1998: Selected Poems 1976–1997, Faber and Faber
  • 2001: A Long Story, The Old School Press
  • 2002: Public Property, Faber and Faber
  • 2009: The Cinder Path, Faber and Faber
  • 2012: The Customs House, Faber and Faber
  • 2015: Peace Talks, Faber and Faber
  • 2015: Coming Home, Fine Press Poetry
  • 2017: Coming in to Land: Selected Poems, 1975–2015, Ecco Press
  • 2018: Essex Clay, Faber and Faber
  • 2020: Randomly Moving Particles, Faber and Faber
  • 2026: Gravity Archives, Faber and Faber

Criticism

  • 1980: The Poetry of Edward Thomas. Routledge & Kegan Paul
  • 1982: Philip Larkin. (Contemporary Writers series) Methuen
  • 1986: Elizabeth Bishop. (Chatterton Lectures on an English Poet)
  • 1998: Sarah Raphael: Strip!. Marlborough Fine Art (London)
  • 2008: Ways of Life: On Places, Painters and Poets. Faber and Faber

Biography

  • 1986: The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit. Chatto & Windus
  • 1993: Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life. Faber and Faber
  • 1997: Keats: A Biography. Faber and Faber

Memoirs

  • 2006: In the Blood: A Memoir of my Childhood. Faber and Faber

Fiction

  • 1989: The Pale Companion. Penguin
  • 1991: Famous for the Creatures. Viking
  • 2003: The Invention of Dr Cake. Faber and Faber
  • 2000: Wainewright the Poisoner: The Confessions of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (biographical nove])
  • 2012: Silver. Jonathan Cape
  • 2015: The New World. Crown

References

  • Profile and poems written and audio at the Poetry Archive
  • Profile at Poets.org
  • National Portrait Gallery portraits
  • John Crace, Profile | "Andrew Motion: Mr Speaker", The Guardian, 13 December 2005.
  • Richard Lea and Christian Bennett, "Andrew Motion on war poetry", The Guardian, 27 July 2009. Interview and reading (Video, 8 mins).
  • BBC profile. BBC interview "Andrew Motion on being Poet Laureate" (Video, 4 mins). BBC interview "Andrew Motion's Hindu Wood Carving" (Video 4 mins)
  • A chapter from Keats, about John Keats, Fanny Brawne, and his poem for her, "Bright Star"
  • , Andrew Motion's Romanes Lecture (2011) at Oxford University (video)
  • Papers of Andrew Motion at the British Library