Andrew Motion
Andrew Motion
Sir Andrew Motion, FRSLis an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom 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...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth26 October 1952
begin dragons early emails partly phone ringing sort starts time
I'm an early bird, partly because I like to have some quiet time and partly because by 9am emails begin arriving, the phone starts ringing and I have dragons to kill of one sort or another.
heaven
I'm ensuring my place in heaven.
writing want hats
But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.
writing way poet
But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
flames light bombs
Each sudden gust of light explains itself as flames, but neither they, nor even bombs redoubled on the hills tonight can quite include me in their fear.
moving want sympathetic
I am a vigilant monarchist. I want to see things evolve. The direction the monarchy seems to be moving in - towards a more mainland-European model - is one I would feel sympathetic about.
writing done way
I am writing more than I have ever done. My life has come back to me in the most extraordinary way.
beautiful extraordinary-person imagination
I deeply adored my mum. She was an extraordinary person, even for the prejudice I'm likely to have. She was beautiful, amusing, a tremendous elaborator of things into comic proportions and extravagant in her imagination.
writing two tea
I get up at 5.30am, sluice myself and have two Weetabix and some mint tea, before starting to write by 6am.
beautiful buying painting
I like eating out. I like buying beautiful paintings and being surrounded by beautiful things. I have to finance that life. I can barely afford a pension scheme because I don't make enough money.
islands gone treasure
I read ' Treasure Island' for the first time at university. And I started to notice then how unresolved some things were. Later, I realised that Stevenson was interested in sequels, and I wondered whether he would have gone back to it had he lived longer.
powerful interesting way
In a fragile environment, we need to be aware of ourselves as members of a uniquely powerful species living among other species who are quite as interesting as we are but vulnerable to us because we are cleverer in more destructive ways.
pain real alive
Jenni Fagan is the real thing, and The Panopticon is a real treat: maturely alive to the pains of maturing, and cleverly amused as well as appalled by what it finds in the world.
honor ordinary
Honor the miraculousness of the ordinary.