Andrew Motion
Sir Andrew Motion was born in London, England, on October 26, 1952, and raised in Stisted, a village in Essex. He is the son of an army colonel and brewery executive. Motion studied at Radley College from 1965 to 1970, where he was introduced to the poetry of Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and others. He later studied weekly with W. H. Auden at University College, Oxford.
In 1977, Motion’s first collection of poems, The Pleasure Steamers, was published by Sycamore Press. Other early collections include Natural Causes (Trafalgar Square, 1987), which won the Dylan Thomas Prize, and Dangerous Play: Poems, 1974–1984 (Salamander Press/Penguin, 1984), which received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Since then, Motion has published numerous volumes of poetry which include Gravity Archives (Faber & Faber, 2026), short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize; The Cinder Path (Faber and Faber, 2009), short-listed for the 2010 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry; The Mower: New & Selected Poems (David R. Godine, 2009); and Public Property (Faber and Faber, 2002), comprised of verse written during years of service as poet laureate of the United Kingdom.
Motion has also published several collections of autobiographical prose, including Ways of Life: On Places, Painters and Poets (Faber and Faber, 2008), the memoir In the Blood: A Memoir of My Childhood (Faber & Faber, 2006), as well as fiction, including The Invention of Dr. Cake (Faber & Faber, 2003).
Professor and critic Neil Corcoran has commented on Motion’s relationship to “narrative” poetry, explaining that “effects of pathos are created by the attempt at some kind of interiority of empathy with the sufferings of fictionalized characters drawn usually from episodes of English history: seventeenth-century Fenland, World War II, the end of the British Empire in India.” Motion’s style has also often been compared to the British poet Edward Thomas.
Summarizing Motion’s style for the Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature, the scholar Rose Atfield has written:
His poetry is meditative, lyrical, and understated. The clarity and directness of his personal and narrative poems make them readily accessible, yet there are intriguing images and a sense of restraint that draw the reader into the poems and suggest undisclosed undercurrents.
From 1977 until 1981, Motion served as Lecturer in English at the University of Hull, where he met and became close friends with the poet and librarian Philip Larkin. When Larkin died in 1985, his longtime companion Monica Jones requested that Motion consider writing a biography of his mentor and friend. Already serving as Larkin’s literary executor, Motion obliged her and in 1993 published Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (Faber and Faber), which won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Motion also wrote Keats: A Biography (Faber and Faber, 1987), which inspired film director Jane Campion’s adaptation Bright Star in 2009.
Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and knighted in 1999, Motion’s other honors include the Somerset Maugham Award. He lives in London, England.