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ANDREW MOTION
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Professor Andrew Motion was born in London on 26 October 1952, and read English at University College, Oxford. He taught English at the University of Hull (1976-81) where he met the poet Philip Larkin. He was editor of Poetry Review (1981-83) and was Poetry Editor and Editorial Director at London publishers Chatto & Windus (1983-89). He succeeded Malcolm Bradbury as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has been Chairman of the Arts Council of England's Literature Panel since 1996. An acclaimed poet (and champion of poetry), critic, biographer and lecturer, Andrew Motion became Poet Laureate in 1999, succeeding Ted Hughes.
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He was awarded the Newdigate Prize at Oxford for his poem 'Inland', included in his first collection of poems, The Pleasure Steamers, published in 1977. His poetry collections include Independence (1981); Secret Narratives (1983); Dangerous Play: Poems 1974-1984 (1984), which won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Natural Causes (1987), which won the Dylan Thomas Award; The Price of Everything (1994); Salt Water (1997) and Selected Poems 1976-1997 (1998).
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Andrew Motion is also the author of several acclaimed biographies including The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit (1986), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (1993), which won the Whitbread Biography Award; a life of John Keats published in 1997; and Wainewright the Poisoner (2000), an account of the life of Thomas Wainewright, critic, forger, painter and suspected murderer.
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Andrew Motion lives in London. His most recent collection of poems is Public Property (2002), and a new short novel, The Invention of Dr Cake, which combines elements of mystery and detective fiction, was published in 2003.
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Prizes and awards
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1975 Newdigate Prize
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1981 Arvon Foundation/Observer International Poetry Competition The Letter
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1984 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize Dangerous Play: Poems 1974-1984
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1987 Dylan Thomas Award Natural Causes
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1987 Somerset Maugham Award The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit
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1993 Whitbread Biography Award Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life
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Authors Statement
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"My poems are the product of a relationship between a side of my mind which is conscious, alert, educated and manipulative, and a side which is as murky as a primaeval swamp. I can't predict when this relationship will flower. If I try to goad it into existence I merely engage with one side of my mind or the other, and the poem suffers.
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I want my writing to be as clear as water. No ornate language; very few obvious tricks. I want readers to be able to see all the way down through its surfaces into the swamp. I want them to feel they're in a world they thought they knew, but which turns out to be stranger, more charged, more disturbed than they realised. In truth, creating this world is a more theatrical operation than the writing admits, and it's this discretion about strong feeling, and strong feeling itself, which keeps drawing me back to the writers I most admire: Wordsworth, Edward Thomas, Philip Larkin.'
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