Andrew Motion’s most recent collections are New and Selected Poems 1977-2023 (2023), and Waders (2024); he has also written two volumes of autobiography, In the Blood (2006) and Sleeping on Islands (2023), biographies of Philip Larkin and John Keats, and a book of essays, Ways of Life. He is the co-editor, with Stephen Regan, of The Penguin Book of Elegy.

Motion was the UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009 and is co-founder of the Poetry Archive and Poetry by Heart; he was knighted for his services to poetry in 2009. Before joining the Writing Seminars in 2015, he was Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Photo courtesy of Johnny Ring.

Motion teaches both poetry and fiction workshops. His academic work has concentrated on Romantic literature, and on c20 and contemporary British and American poetry. He also has a keen interest in War Poetry (c20 and other), and Environmental Writing.

Andrew Motion’s essays and reviews have been published very widely in British as well as American journals and newspapers, including the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New York Times Review, the Observer, and the Times Literary Supplement.  So have his poems, which have also been included in a number of anthologies, including the New Oxford Book of War Poetry.