Andrew Motion

Sir Andrew Motion
Born	26 October 1952 (1952-10-26) London, England
Occupation	Poet, novelist, biographer
Period	1972–present

Sir Andrew Motion, FRSL (born 26 October 1952) is an English poet, novelist and biographer, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009.

Life and career

Motion was born in London and raised in Stisted near Braintree in Essex. After being sent, at the age of seven, to boarding school, was educated at Radley College. Here, in the sixth form, he encountered Mr Wray, an inspiring English teacher who introduced him to poetry – first Hardy, then Philip Larkin, W H Auden, Heaney, Hughes, Wordsworth and Keats. When he was 17 years old, his mother had a riding accident and spent the next nine years in and out of a coma before dying. Motion has said that he wrote to keep his memory of his mother alive and she was a muse of his work. In the years that followed, he read English at University College, Oxford, where he studied with W. H. Auden in weekly sessions. Motion says “I worshipped him the other side of idolatry and it was like spending an hour each week in the presence of God.” He won the university's Newdigate Prize and graduated with a first class degree.

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 university Librarian and poet Philip Larkin. 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 long time 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 Editorial Director and Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus (1983–89), he edited the Poetry Society's Poetry Review from 1980–1982 and succeeded Malcolm Bradbury as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Laureateship

Photo of the poem "What if" taken on Howard Street, Sheffield (2007)

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 I've finished for Cambridge University with Peter Maxwell Davies." In 2003, Motion wrote Regime change, a poem in protest at 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. As he prepared to stand down from the job, Motion published an article in The Guardian which 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. In 2003, he became Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. 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. He has been a member of English Heritage's Blue Plaques Panel since 2008.

Motion was selected as jury chair for the Man Booker Prize 2010 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 Return to Treasure Island, the story is set a generation on from the original book and it is expected to be published in 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.

Twice married, he has two sons and one daughter and lives in Islington, North London.

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".His an author's statement, Motion describes further the intention of his work:

My poems are the product of a relationship between a side of my mind which is conscious, alert, educated and manipulative, and a side which is as murky as a primaeval swamp. I can't predict when this relationship will flower. If I try to goad it into existence I merely engage with one side of my mind or the other, and the poem suffers. I want my writing to be as clear as water. No ornate language; very few obvious tricks. I want readers to be able to see all the way down through its surfaces into the swamp. I want them to feel they're in a world they thought they knew, but which turns out to be stranger, more charged, more disturbed than they realised. In truth, creating this world is a more theatrical operation than the writing admits, and it's this discretion about strong feeling, and strong feeling itself, which keeps drawing me back to the writers I most admire: Wordsworth, Edward Thomas, Philip Larkin.

The Independent describes the stalwart poet as the "charming and tireless defender of the art form". 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, writing and performing a piece based upon a chapter of the King James Bible.

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
• 1986: 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: Knighthood

Selected collected works

Poetry

• 1972: Goodnestone: a sequence. Workshop Press
• 1976: Inland. Cygnet Press
• 1977: The Pleasure Steamers. Sycamore Press
• 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

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 and memoir

• 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
• 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 novel)

Edited works, introductions, and forwards

• 1981: Selected Poems: William Barnes. Penguin Classics
• 1982: The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry with Blake Morrison. Penguin
• 1994: Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems. Dent
• 1993: New Writing 2 (With Malcolm Bradbury). Minerva in association with the British Council
• 1994: New Writing 3 (With Candice Rodd). Minerva in association with the British Council
• 1997: Penguin Modern Poets: Volume 11 with Michael Donaghy and Hugo Williams. Penguin
• 1998: Take 20: New Writing. University of East Anglia
• 1999: Verses of the Poets Laureate: From John Dryden to Andrew Motion. With Hilary Laurie. Orion.
• 1999: Babel: New Writing by the University of East Anglia's MA Writers. University of East Anglia.
• 2001: Firsthand: The New Anthology of Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. University of East Anglia
• 2002: Paper Scissors Stone: New Writing from the MA in Creative Writing at UEA. University of East Anglia.
• 2001: The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction & Poetry. With Julia Bell. Macmillan
• 2000: John Keats: Poems Selected by Andrew Motion. Faber and Faber
• 2001: Here to Eternity: An Anthology of Poetry. Faber and Faber
• 2002: The Mays Literary Anthology; Guest editor. Varsity Publications
• 2003: 101 Poems Against War Faber and Faber (Afterword)
• 2003: First World War Poems. Faber and Faber
• 2006: Collins Rhyming Dictionary. Collins
• 2007: Bedford Square 2: New Writing from the Royal Holloway Creative Writing Programme. John Murray Ltd.

External links

• Profile and poems written and audio at the Poetry Archive
• Profile at Poets.org
• National Portrait Gallery portraits
• Andrew Motion at Contemporary Writers
• Guardian profile 13 December 2005 "Andrew Motion: Mr Speaker". Guardian "Andrew Motion on war poetry". Interview and reading. 27 July 2009 (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"

Preceded by Ted Hughes

British Poet Laureate 1999–2009

Succeeded by Carol Ann Duffy