'I would like to see poets associated with all sorts of surprising places, everywhere from zoos to football clubs ' Andrew Motion

Andrew Motion's latest collection of poems is The Cinder Path (Faber) and Ways of Life: Places, Painters and Poets (Faber) is his latest collection of essays.

Andrew Motion was born in 1952. He read English at University College, Oxford and subsequently spent two years writing about the poetry of Edward Thomas for an M. Litt. From 1976 to 1980 he taught English at the University of Hull; from 1980 to 1982 he edited the Poetry Review and from 1982 to 1989 he was Editorial Director and Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus. He is now Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London. 

Andrew Motion has been chosen to judge next year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Sir Andrew is a council member of the Advertising Standards Authority and, since July, Chairman of the Museums, Libraries & Archives Council.

Andrew Motion was Poet Laureate from 1999 until 2009. He was knighted for his services to literature in 2009.

Andrew Motion’s work has received the Arvon/Observer Prize, the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize, the De Moffart Art Prize (2006) and the Dylan Thomas Prize. In 1994 his biography of Philip Larkin was awarded the Whitbread Prize for Biography, and shortlisted for the NCR Award. The Lamberts won the Somerset Maugham Award. 

'Compelling, simple & mysterious' Sean O'Brien Sunday Times
'His voice is unlike any other' Lavinia Greenlaw New Statesman & Society
'Motion is a beautiful lyricist unpretentiously and precisely describing those things worth having even as he casts unsettling shadows across them' Robert Potts The Guardian

In addition to making regular visits to schools and Festivals, he has also co-founded The Poetry Archive, a web-based collection of poets reading their work which will have a significant value for general readers as well as teachers and students (it includes a dedicated 'education zone'). www.poetryarchive.org  

“The best poems are those which speak to us about the important things in our lives in a way that we never forget. Any heavier definition than that begins to collapse under its own weight and exclude many forms of poetry. But we live in a very diverse culture and the great opportunity that poetry has now is to make sure that all its various voices have an equal and proper space given to them. In this way, they can link up with the lives from which they arose in the first place.”

National Poetry Day 2008 saw Andrew talking about poetry & poets to students at the University of Amsterdam. http://www.student.uva.nl/eng/engels.cfm/FADD6AFB-1321-B0BE-685EF595C88E3915

"The idea of a living poet coming to the school and talking about their work was absolutely unimaginable when I was growing up. It wasn't quite as bad as saying that the only good poets were dead poets but it was nearly like that."