Andrew Motion | |
---|---|
![]() Motion, reading poetry in 2009 | |
Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom | |
In office 1 May 1999 –1 May 2009 | |
Monarch | Elizabeth II |
Preceded by | Ted Hughes |
Succeeded by | Carol Ann Duffy |
Personal details | |
Born | London,England | 26 October 1952
Spouses |
|
Children | 3 |
Education | Radley College |
Alma mater | University College, Oxford |
Occupation | Poet |
Sir Andrew Motion FRSL (born 26 October 1952) is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate 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. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.
Motion was born on 26 October 1952 [1] in London, to (Andrew) Richard Michael Motion (1921-2006), [2] a brewer at Ind Coope, [3] and (Catherine) Gillian (née Bakewell; 1928–1978). [2] [4] [5] [6] Richard Motion was from a brewing dynasty; his grandfather founded Taylor Walker, but this had been absorbed by Ind Coope by Richard Motion's time. [3] The Motion family were wealthy armigers who lived at Upton House, Banbury, Oxfordshire, and were prominent in the local area; Richard Motion's grandfather Andrew Richard Motion was a Justice of the Peace for Essex, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, who had worked his way up from being a brewery labourer in the East End of London to ownership of his own successful brewery. When his children had grown up and married, he sold the Upton House estate and went to live at Stisted Hall, in Essex. [7] [8] [9]
When Motion was 12 years old, the family moved to Glebe House [10] at Stisted, near Braintree in Essex, where Richard Motion's grandparents had previously lived at Stisted Hall, by that time converted into a home for the elderly. [11] [12] [13] [6] Motion went to boarding school from the age of seven [14] joined by his younger brother. [6] Most of his friends were from the school and so when Motion was in the village, he spent a lot of time on his own. [6] He began to have an interest and affection for the countryside, and he went for walks with a pet dog. [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. [14] [15]
When Motion was 17 years old, his mother had a horse-riding accident and suffered a serious head injury requiring a lifesaving neurosurgery operation. She regained some speech, but she was severely paralysed and remained in and out of coma for nine years. [16] She died in 1978 and her husband died of cancer in 2006. [6] Motion has said that he wrote to keep his memory of his mother alive. [17] When Motion was about 18 years old, he moved away from the village to study English at University College, Oxford; [17] however, since then he has remained in contact with the village to visit the church graveyard, where his parents are buried, and also to see his brother, who lives nearby. At University he studied at weekly sessions with W. H. Auden, whom he greatly admired. [15] Motion won the university's Newdigate Prize and graduated with a first class honours degree. [6] This was followed by an MLitt on the poetry of Edward Thomas.
Between 1976 and 1980, Motion taught English at the University of Hull [17] and while there, at age 24, he had his first volume of poetry published. At Hull he met the 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 longtime 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. [18] 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 to 1982 and succeeded Malcolm Bradbury as professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia. [17] He is now on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
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. [19] 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 he finished for Cambridge University with Peter Maxwell Davies." [20]
On 14 March 2002, as part of the 'Re-weaving Rainbows' event of National Science Week 2002, Motion unveiled a blue plaque on the front wall of 28 St Thomas Street, Southwark, to commemorate the sharing of lodgings there by John Keats and Henry Stephens while they were medical students at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in 1815–16.
In 2003, Motion wrote Regime change, a poem in protest at the Invasion of Iraq from the point of view of Death walking the streets during the conflict, [21] [22] 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. [23]
As laureate, he also founded the Poetry Archive, an on-line library of historic and contemporary recordings of poets reciting their own work. [24]
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". [25] The appointment of Motion met with criticism from some quarters. [26] 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. 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." [20] [27]
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.
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. [17] In 2003, he became professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. [28] Since July 2009, Motion has been Chairman of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) appointed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. [17] [29] He is also a vice-president of the Friends of the British Library, a charity which provides funding support to the British Library. [30] He was knighted in the 2009 Queen's Birthday Honours list. [17] 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 [31] [32] [33] 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 Silver, the story is set a generation on from the original book and was published in March 2012. [34] 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. [35] [36] Motion's debut play Incoming , about the war in Afghanistan, premièred at the High Tides Festival in Halesworth, Suffolk in May 2011. [37] Motion also featured in Jamie's Dream School in 2011 as the poetry teacher.
In June 2012, he became the President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. In March 2014 he was elected an Honorary Fellow at Homerton College, Cambridge.
Motion won the 2015 Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry for the radio programme Coming Home. The production featured poetry by Motion based on recordings he made of British soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. [38]
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. [39]
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". [40] Motion says that he aims to write in clear language without tricks. [40]
The Independent describes the stalwart poet as the "charming and tireless defender of the art form". [14] Motion has won the Arvon Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Eric Gregory Award, Whitbread Prize for Biography and the Dylan Thomas Prize. [17] [40]
Motion took part in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty-Six Books , writing and performing a piece based upon a book of the King James Bible . [41]
Motion's marriage to Joanna Powell ended in 1983. [42] He was married to Jan Dalley from 1985 to 2009, divorcing after a seven-year separation. They had one son born in 1986 and twins, a son and a daughter, born in 1988. In 2010 he married Kyeong-Soo Kim. He currently lives part of the year in Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States.
![]() |
Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected |
---|---|---|---|
A Cabbage White | 2018 | Motion, Andrew (22 February 2018). "A Cabbage White". The New York Review of Books. 65 (3): 18. | |
Chincoteague | 2018 | Motion, Andrew (22 February 2018). "Chincoteague". The New York Review of Books. 65 (3): 24. | |
John Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces". Jorge Luis Borges named his first time reading Keats an experience he felt all his life. Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. Typically of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery. Today his poems and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature – in particular "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Sleep and Poetry" and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".
Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Philip Arthur Larkin was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947). He came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, with his articles gathered in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 (1985), and edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973). His many honours include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of Sir John Betjeman.
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC was an English poet and soldier. He was one of the leading poets of the First World War. His war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was much influenced by his mentor Siegfried Sassoon and stood in contrast to the public perception of war at the time and to the confidently patriotic verse written by earlier war poets such as Rupert Brooke. Among his best-known works – most of which were published posthumously – are "Dulce et Decorum est", "Insensibility", "Anthem for Doomed Youth", "Futility", "Spring Offensive" and "Strange Meeting". Owen was killed in action on 4 November 1918, a week before the war's end, at the age of 25.
Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".
Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, and her term expired in 2019. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.
Simon Robert Armitage is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. He was appointed Poet Laureate on 10 May 2019. He is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds.
Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet.
Wendy Cope is a contemporary English poet. She read history at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She now lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire, with her husband, the poet Lachlan Mackinnon.
Charles Stanley Causley CBE FRSL was a British poet, school teacher and writer. His work is often noted for its simplicity and directness as well as its associations with folklore, legends and magic, especially when linked to his native Cornwall.
Faber and Faber Limited, usually abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Milan Kundera and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Philip Gross is a poet, novelist, playwright, children's writer and academic based in England and Wales. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Wales.
Alan James Hollinghurst is an English novelist, poet, short story writer and translator. He won the 1989 Somerset Maugham Award, the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and for his novel The Line of Beauty the 2004 Booker Prize. Hollinghurst is credited with having helped gay-themed fiction to break into the literary mainstream through his six novels since 1988.
Anthony Simon Thwaite was an English poet and critic, widely known as the editor of his friend Philip Larkin's collected poems and letters.
Peter Neville Frederick Porter OAM was a British-based Australian poet.
Hugo Williams FRSL is an English poet, journalist and travel writer. He received the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1999 and Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2004.
Bernard O'Donoghue FRSL is a contemporary Irish poet and academic.
Matthew Francis is a British poet, editor of W. S. Graham's New Collected Poems, and a professor at the Aberystwyth University. In 2004, Francis was included on the Poetry Book Society's list of the 20 best modern poets as selected by a panel chaired by poet laureate Timmy Mallett.
Michael Donaghy was a New York City poet and musician, who lived in London from 1985.
Joe Dunthorne is a Welsh novelist, poet and journalist. He made his name with his novel Submarine (2008), made into a film in 2010. His second novel, Wild Abandon (2011), won the RSL Encore Award. A selection of his poems was published in 2010 in the Faber and Faber New Poets series. His first solo collection of poems appeared in 2019.