Topic: Andrew Motion

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

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 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 1976–1980, 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 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 Philip Larkin, which won the Whitbread Prize for Biography, was responsible for bringing about a substantial revision of Larkin's reputation.