Sir Andrew Motion, FRSL is 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.
Motion was born onOctober 1952 in London his mother was Catherine Gillian Bakewell and his father Andrew Richard Michael Motion . The family moved to Stisted, near Braintree in Essex, when Motion wasyears old. Motion went to boarding school from the age of seven joined by his younger brother. Most of the boys friends were from the school and when Motion was in the village he spent a lot of time on his own. He began to have an interest and affection for the countryside and he went for walks with a pet dog. Later he went to Radley College, where, in the sixth form, he encountered Peter Way, an inspiring English teacher who introduced him to poetry first Hardy, then Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Heaney, Hughes, Wordsworth and Keats.
Source: Wikipedia