Andrew Motion, British poet, biographer, and novelist who was especially noted for his narrative poetry. [9] Motion won the university's Newdigate Prize and graduated with a first class honours degree. [20] 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.

Daylight breaks and my children trawl the drizzling passage from their room to mine which takes them years but is only a step. The yearly stipend of £200 was increased to £5,000 and he received the customary butt of sack. [36] He was married to Jan Dalley from 1985 to 2009, divorcing after a seven-year separation. [17], As laureate, he also founded the Poetry Archive, an on-line library of historic and contemporary recordings of poets reciting their own work. To greet and understand what lies ahead – Entitled Silver, the story is set a generation on from the original book and was published in March 2012. [22] Since July 2009, Motion has been Chairman of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) appointed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. [6] 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.[8][9]. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and knighted in 1999, Andrew Motion served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009, “I wrote this poem a little less than a year ago, when the scene that it describes (which took place in East Anglia, on the east coast of England, near to where I grew up) suddenly popped into my head. The Editor

28 Little Russell Street A variety of projects have been realised within this project and Sheffield now has a large number of public poems mounted onto buildings across Sheffield. [12] 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 selected as jury chair for the Man Booker Prize 2010[25][26][27] and in March 2010, he announced that he was working with publishers Jonathan Cape on a sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. [11] He has been a member of English Heritage's Blue Plaques Panel since 2008. [11] He is now on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. This innovative ongoing project is called Text and the City.

[32], 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.

[34], The Independent describes the stalwart poet as the "charming and tireless defender of the art form". I used to fancy her – now all I think is what water can do, easing off shoes, making light of the dense net of her tights.

[11][23] He is also a Vice-President of the Friends of the British Library, a charity which provides funding support to the British Library. 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.

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. 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. Carol Ann Duffy succeeded him as Poet Laureate on 1 May 2009.