Andrew Motion was born in 1952 and grew up in Essex, where his family has lived for several generations. He read English at University College, Oxford and from 1976 to 1980 taught at the University of Hull where he came to know Philip Larkin, the subject of his most famous biography.

He has published several volumes of poetry, including Dangerous Play (1984), Natural Causes (1987), Love In A Life (1991) and The Price of Everything (1994). His biography The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit was published in 1986 and Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, which won the Whitbread Prize for Biography, in 1993. He is also the biographer of John Keats (1997). His Selected Poems 1976-97 were published in 1998 and his most recent book of poems Public Property in 2002. Wainewright the Poisoner appeared in 2000.

Andrew Motion is Chair of the Literature Panel of the Arts Council of England and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was head of the Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia for eight years and has now taken up a post as professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway College, London University. His work has received the Arvon/Observer Prize, the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. He was appointed as Poet Laureate in May 1999.

In his latest work, The Invention of Dr Cake (2003), Andrew Motion imagines a discovery he made in the course of his research on Keats. He found papers suggesting that Keats might have recovered from his fatal illness and then returned to England to work as a country doctor.

To learn more about Andrew Motion, go to Contemporary Writers.