Andrew Motion |
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Andrew Motion, FRSL, (born 26 October 1952) is an English poet, novelist and biographer, who was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009.
Raised in Stisted near Braintree in Essex, he was educated at Radley College. 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 she died. In the years that followed, he read English at University College, Oxford, and studied the poetry of Edward Thomas for his MLitt. degree. In 1975, while an undergraduate, he won the university's Newdigate Prize. Motion has said that he tried to keep his memory of his mother alive through poetry.
Andrew Motion is a member of the Arts Council of England and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Beside the prizes mentioned above, he has won the Arvon/Observer Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London.