Andrew Motion

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.

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).

Richard Motion was from a brewing dynasty; his grandfather founded Taylor Walker, but this had been absorbed by Ind Coope by Richard Motion's time.

The Motion family were wealthy armigers who lived at Upton House, Banbury, Oxfordshire, and were prominent in the local area; Richard Motion's grandfather Andrew Richard Motion was a Justice of the Peace for Essex, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, who had worked his way up from being a brewery labourer in the East End of London to ownership of his own successful brewery.

When his children had grown up and married, he sold the Upton House estate and went to live at Stisted Hall, in Essex.

When Motion was 12 years old, the family moved to Glebe House 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.

Motion went to boarding school from the age of seven joined by his younger brother.

Most of his friends were from the school and so when Motion was in the village, he spent a lot of time on his own.

He began to have an interest and affection for the countryside, and he went for walks with a pet dog.

Later he went to Radley College, where, in the sixth form, he encountered Peter Way, an inspiring English teacher who introduced him to poetry – first Hardy, then Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Heaney, Hughes, Wordsworth and Keats.

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.

Between 1976 and 1980, Motion taught English at the University of Hull and while there, at age 24, he had his first volume of poetry published.

At Hull he met the university librarian and poet Philip Larkin.

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; however, since then he has remained in contact with the village to visit the church graveyard, where his parents are buried, and also to see his brother, who lives nearby.

At University he studied at weekly sessions with W. H. Auden, whom he greatly admired.

Motion won the university's Newdigate Prize and graduated with a first class honours degree.

This was followed by an MLitt on the poetry of Edward Thomas.

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 is now on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.

Motion was later appointed as one of Larkin's literary executors, which would privilege Motion's role as his biographer following Larkin's death in 1985.

In Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, Motion says that at no time during their nine-year friendship did they discuss writing his biography and it was Larkin's longtime companion Monica Jones who requested it.

He reports how, as executor, he rescued many of Larkin's papers from imminent destruction following his friend's death.

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 appointed Poet Laureate on 1 May 1999, following the death of Ted Hughes, the previous incumbent.

The Nobel Prize-winning Northern Irish poet and translator Seamus Heaney had ruled himself out for the post.

Breaking with the tradition of the laureate retaining the post for life, Motion stipulated that he would stay for only ten years.

The yearly stipend of £200 was increased to £5,000 and he received the customary butt of sack.

He wanted to write "poems about things in the news, and commissions from people or organisations involved with ordinary life," rather than be seen 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."

On 14 March 2002, as part of the 'Re-weaving Rainbows' event of National Science Week 2002, Motion unveiled a blue plaque on the front wall of 28 St Thomas Street, Southwark, to commemorate the sharing of lodgings there by John Keats and Henry Stephens while they were medical students at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in 1815–16.

In 2003, Motion wrote Regime change, a poem in protest at the Invasion of Iraq from the point of view of Death walking the streets during the conflict, 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 World War I, 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.

In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.