Эндрю Моушен: Жизнь и творчество поэта и биографа

English poet and writer (born 1952)

Sir Andrew Motion (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 in London, to (Andrew) Richard Michael Motion (1921 2006), a brewer at Ind Coope, and (Catherine) Gillian (née Bakewell; 1928–1978). When Motion was 12 years old, the family moved to Glebe House 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. 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. She died in 1978 and her husband died of cancer in 2006. Motion has said that he wrote to keep his memory of his mother alive. When Motion was about 18 years old, he moved away from the village to study English at University College, Oxford; 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. 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." 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. As laureate, he also founded the Poetry Archive, an on line library of historic and contemporary recordings of poets reciting their own work. 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 Motion met with criticism from some quarters. 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." 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. Since July 2009, Motion has been Chairman of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) appointed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. He is also a vice president of the Friends of the British Library, a charity which provides funding support to the British Library. He was knighted in the 2009 Queen's Birthday Honours list. 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. 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. Motion's debut play Incoming, about the war in Afghanistan, premièred at the High Tides Festival in Halesworth, Suffolk in May 2011. 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. 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.

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

Motion's marriage to Joanna Powell ended in 1983. 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.

1980: The Poetry of Edward Thomas. Routledge & Kegan Paul
1982: Philip Larkin. (Contemporary Writers series) Methuen
1986: Elizabeth Bishop. (Chatterton Lectures on an English Poet)
1998: Sarah Raphael: Strip!. Marlborough Fine Art (London)
2008: Ways of Life: On Places, Painters and Poets. Faber and Faber

1986: The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit. Chatto & Windus
1993: Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life. Faber and Faber
1997: Keats: A Biography. Faber and Faber

2006: In the Blood: A Memoir of my Childhood. Faber and Faber

1981: Selected Poems: William Barnes. Penguin Classics
1982: The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry with Blake Morrison. Penguin
1994: Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems. Dent
1993: New Writing 2 (With Malcolm Bradbury). Minerva in association with the British Council
1994: New Writing 3 (With Candice Rodd). Minerva in association with the British Council
1997: Penguin Modern Poets: Volume 11 with Michael Donaghy and Hugo Williams. Penguin
1998: Take 20: New Writing. University of East Anglia
1999: Verses of the Poets Laureate: From John Dryden to Andrew Motion. With Hilary Laurie. Orion. 1999: Babel: New Writing by the University of East Anglia's MA Writers. University of East Anglia. 2001: Firsthand: The New Anthology of Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. University of East Anglia
2002: Paper Scissors Stone: New Writing from the MA in Creative Writing at UEA. University of East Anglia. 2001: The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction & Poetry. With Julia Bell. Macmillan
2000: John Keats: Poems Selected by Andrew Motion. Faber and Faber
2001: Here to Eternity: An Anthology of Poetry. Faber and Faber
2002: The Mays Literary Anthology; Guest editor. Varsity Publications
2003: 101 Poems Against War. Faber and Faber (Afterword)
2003: First World War Poems. Faber and Faber
2006: Collins Rhyming Dictionary. Collins
2007: Bedford Square 2: New Writing from the Royal Holloway Creative Writing Programme. John Murray Ltd.