Faber & Faber

Andrew Motion

Andrew Motion was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999; he is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and co-founder of the online poetry collection, The Poetry Archive. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, and has published four celebrated biographies. His group study The Lamberts won the Somerset Maugham Award and his authorised life of Philip Larkin won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Andrew Motion’s novella The Invention of Dr Cake (2003) was described as ‘amazingly clever’ by the Irish Times and praised for ‘brilliant and almost hallucinatory vividness’ by the Sunday Telegraph. His memoir, In the Blood (2006), was described as ‘the most moving and exquisitely written account of childhood loss I have ever read’ in the Independent on Sunday. Andrew Motion was knighted for his services to literature in 2009.