Sir Andrew Motion: poet, biographer and laureate

Andrew Motion’s career has moved between poetry, biography, teaching and public service. He became Poet Laureate in 1999, but his approach to the post was deliberately time-limited: he set out to serve for ten years and to write about events in the news and the lives of people and organisations beyond the court. Alongside poems for public occasions, he built a lasting resource for readers and listeners, and wrote a biography that helped change how Philip Larkin was understood.

Learning to read poetry

Born in London on 26 October 1952, Motion attended Radley College before studying English at University College, Oxford. At Radley, his English teacher Peter Way introduced him to poets including Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Wordsworth and Keats. At Oxford, Motion attended weekly sessions with Auden, won the university’s Newdigate Prize for poetry and graduated with first-class honours. He went on to complete an MLitt on the poetry of Edward Thomas.

Motion began teaching English at the University of Hull in 1976. There he met Larkin, then the university librarian, and became one of his literary executors. The relationship brought a demanding responsibility after Larkin’s death: as executor, Motion rescued papers that were at risk of destruction. In 1993 he published Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. The biography won the Whitbread Prize for Biography and prompted a substantial reassessment of Larkin’s reputation.

Motion’s first poetry collection, The Pleasure Steamers, appeared in 1978. Collections that followed included Independence (1981), Secret Narratives (1983) and Dangerous Play: Poems 1974–1984, which received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. He also worked as an editor: he edited the Poetry Society’s Poetry Review from 1980 to 1982, then became editorial director and poetry editor at Chatto & Windus from 1983 to 1989.

A ten-year laureateship

Motion was appointed Poet Laureate on 1 May 1999, after the death of Ted Hughes. Rather than treat the office as a lifetime appointment, he stipulated a ten-year term. He wanted to write poems connected with current events and commissions from organisations involved in ordinary life, rather than be seen simply as a court poet. Carol Ann Duffy succeeded him on 1 May 2009.

The work ranged across public and ceremonial subjects. Motion wrote about liberty for the Trades Union Congress, homelessness for the Salvation Army and bullying for ChildLine. Other commissions responded to the foot-and-mouth outbreak, the Paddington rail disaster and the 11 September attacks. He wrote Regime Change in 2003 as a protest against the invasion of Iraq, and composed Spring Wedding for the 2005 wedding of the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles. In 2008, his five-part poem about Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the First World War, was read and received by Patch at the Bishop’s Palace in Wells.

The office also had costs. Motion later said some of its duties were difficult and onerous, and that the appointment had been damaging to his own work. In his account as he prepared to leave, he described the ten years as at once remarkably difficult and remarkably fulfilling. His final day included a creative-writing class at Radley, followed by a reading and thanks to Peter Way, the teacher who had introduced him to poetry.

Making poetry heard and taught

During his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online library of historic and contemporary recordings of poets reading their own work. The recordings make the spoken sound of a poem available alongside its printed text: pace, emphasis and the poet’s own interpretation remain part of the record. The archive extended his public work beyond individual commissions, giving listeners a way to encounter poetry through the voices of its writers.

Teaching remained another strand of his career. Motion succeeded Malcolm Bradbury as professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia and became professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2003. In 2017 he moved to Baltimore to take up a post at Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars. His other roles included chairing the Arts Council of England’s literature panel, chairing the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council from 2009, and serving as president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England from 2012.

His work has continued to cross literary forms. In 2012 he published Silver, a sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, set a generation after the original. His other fiction includes The Invention of Dr Cake (2003), while his poetry collections include The Cinder Path (2009), The Customs House (2012) and Peace Talks (2015). Coming Home, a radio programme built around recordings Motion made of British soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, won the 2015 Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry.

Recognition and a continuing literary life

Motion’s honours include the Eric Gregory Award, the Arvon Foundation’s International Poetry Competition, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Biography. He was knighted in 2009 for services to literature and received the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award in 2014. In 2010 he chaired the jury for the Man Booker Prize; in 2014 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge.

His life in literature has also included work on English literary history and its public remembrance. He joined English Heritage’s Blue Plaques Panel in 2008 and, in 2002, unveiled a plaque in Southwark commemorating the lodgings shared by John Keats and Henry Stephens while they were medical students. His own writing has included a biography of Keats, a memoir of his childhood, criticism and essays, as well as poems and novels. These different forms have given him routes both into the lives of individual writers and into the institutions and audiences that keep literature in circulation.

Why Andrew Motion deserves a place in British Legacy

Motion’s place in British literary life rests on more than the distinction of having been Poet Laureate. His biography of Philip Larkin brought the responsibilities of literary executor and biographer together: he preserved papers after Larkin’s death, then used them in a work that helped substantially revise the poet’s reputation. That example shows how literary heritage depends not only on writing new work but also on preserving and interpreting the records left by earlier writers.

As laureate, Motion used a national office to take poetry into conversation with subjects as varied as homelessness, bullying, war, public disaster and a royal wedding. The ten-year limit he set for himself made the term’s duration part of his approach, while the commissions reveal a poet addressing civic life as well as ceremonial occasions. The Poetry Archive gave that public purpose a durable form: recordings preserve poets reading their own work and allow audiences to hear poetry as performance as well as text. His teaching at British universities, editorial work and later international academic post add another dimension, connecting literary practice with education. Together, these achievements make Motion a significant figure in Britain’s modern literary culture: a writer, interpreter, teacher and advocate who has helped keep poetry audible, teachable and open to public encounter.

Sources

Andrew Motion (revision 1372743849) · Andrew Motion

Adapted in part from Andrew Motion by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.