Andrew Motion

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Professor Andrew Motion (born October 26, 1952) is an English poet, novelist and biographer who is the current Poet Laureate. His poems are known for the insightful way in which they explore loss and desolation.

Raised in Stisted near Braintree in Essex, he was educated at Radley College. When he was 16, his mother had a riding accident and spent the next ten years in and out of a coma before she died. During this time, he read English at University College, Oxford, and studied the poetry of Edward Thomas for his MLitt. degree. 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.

In 2003, Motion wrote a poem in protest at Invasion of Iraq called "Regime Change;" the poem is told from the third person point of view, showing a speech made by Death in the streets of Iraq.

In 2005 he helped to bring online The Poetry Archive containing both historic and contemporary recordings of poets reciting their own work.

[edit] Biography

1976: further poetry published
1976 - 1980: taught English at the University of Hull
1980 - 1982: edited the Poetry Review
1981: wins Arvon international poetry competition with "The Letter"
1982: edits, with Blake Morrison, the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry
1982 - 1989: Editorial Director and Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus
1986: The Lamberts wins the Somerset Maugham Award
1989: Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia
1994: Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life wins the Whitbread Prize for Biography
1999: appointed Poet Laureate for ten years only
2003: appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London

[edit] Publications

List is not complete, needs work...

1972 Goodnestone : a sequence (a series of 18 untitled poems)
1978 The Pleasure Steamers - poetry
1981 Independence - poetry
1986 Elizabeth Bishop (Chatterton Lectures on an English Poet)
1987 Natural Causes - poetry
1988 Philip Larkin (Contemporary Writers)
1989 The Pale Companion - fiction
1992 Famous for the Creatures
1993 Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (biography)
1995 The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit (biography)
1995 The Price of Everything
1997 Salt Water - poetry
1998 Keats (biography)
1998 Take 20
1998 Sarah Raphael: Strip!
1999 Selected Poems 1976-1997
1999 Babel
2000 Wainewright the Poisoner: The Confessions of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (biographical novel)
2002 Public Property (poetry)
2003 The Invention of Dr Cake
2005 Spring Wedding (poem in honour of the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles)

Dates unclear...

Secret narratives
Dangerous play: poems, 1974-1984
Love in a life
Firsthand

Edited works / Introductions

Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (Everyman Library) (Editor)
1994 New Writing 3 by Andrew Motion, Candice Rodd (Editor) (reprinted '94)
1981 Poetry of Edward Thomas
Verses of the Poets Laureate: From John Dryden to Andrew Motion by Hilary Laurie (Compiler), Andrew Motion (Introduction) (Paperback - September 1999)
1982 The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry by Ed. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion
1981 Selected Poems: William Barnes (Penguin Classics) Andrew Motion (Editor)
Here to Eternity: An Anthology of Poetry by Andrew Motion (Editor)
Paper Scissors Stone: New Writing from the MA in Creative Writing at UEA by Andrew Motion (Introduction) (Paperback)
May Anthology 2002 Poetry and Prose by Andrew Motion (Editor), Nick Cave (Editor) (Paperback)
The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction & Poetry by Julia Bell (Editor), Andrew Motion (Foreword)
The Mays