34 Facts About Andrew Motion

Sir Andrew Motion was born on 26 October 1952 and is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009.

Richard Andrew Motion was from a brewing dynasty; his grandfather founded Taylor Walker, but by Richard Andrew Motion's time this had been absorbed by Ind Coope.

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.

Andrew Motion went to boarding school from the age of seven joined by his younger brother.

Andrew Motion began to have an interest and affection for the countryside, and he went for walks with a pet dog.

Andrew Motion regained some speech, but she was severely paralysed and remained in and out of coma for nine years.

Andrew Motion died in 1978 and her husband died of cancer in 2006.

Andrew Motion has said that he wrote to keep his memory of his mother alive.

Andrew Motion won the university's Newdigate Prize and graduated with a first-class honours degree.

Between 1976 and 1980, Andrew Motion taught English at the University of Hull and while there, at the age of 24, he had his first volume of poetry published.

Andrew Motion was later appointed as one of Larkin's literary executors, which would privilege Andrew Motion's role as his biographer following Larkin's death in 1985.

In Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, Andrew 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.

Andrew Motion is on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.

Andrew Motion was appointed Poet Laureate on 1 May 1999, following the death of Ted Hughes, the previous incumbent.

Andrew Motion wanted to write "poems about things in the news, and commissions from people or organisations involved with ordinary life", rather than be seen as a "courtier".

In 2003, Andrew 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, and in 2005, "Spring Wedding" in honour of the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Camilla Parker Bowles.

Andrew 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".

The appointment of Andrew Motion met with criticism from some quarters.

Andrew 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.

Andrew Motion is chairman of the Arts Council of England's literature panel and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Since July 2009, Andrew Motion has been Chairman of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council appointed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Andrew Motion is a vice-president of the Friends of the British Library, a charity which provides funding support to the British Library.

Andrew Motion was knighted in the 2009 Queen's Birthday Honours list.

Andrew Motion has been a member of English Heritage's Blue Plaques Panel since 2008.

Andrew Motion was selected as jury chair for the Man Booker Prize 2010 and in March 2010, he announced that he was working with publishers Jonathan Cape on a sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.

In July 2010, Andrew 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.

Andrew Motion featured in Jamie's Dream School in 2011 as the poetry teacher.

Andrew Motion won the 2015 Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry for the radio programme Coming Home.

The production featured poetry by Andrew Motion based on recordings he made of British soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2017, Andrew 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.

Andrew Motion says that he aims to write in clear language without tricks.

Andrew Motion has won the Arvon Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Eric Gregory Award, Whitbread Prize for Biography and the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Andrew 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.

Andrew Motion was married to Jan Dalley from 1985 to 2009, divorcing after a seven-year separation.