Andrew Motion was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009 and is co-founder of the online Poetry Archive and Poetry by Heart. His most recent collections include Essex Clay (2018) and Randomly Moving Particles (2020). He has written acclaimed biographies of Philip Larkin and John Keats. His memoir of childhood, In the Blood, was published in 2006, and its sequel, Sleeping on Islands: A Life in Poetry, appeared alongside Selected Poems: 1977–2022 in 2023. Having been Professor of Creative Writing at UEA and Royal Holloway, University of London, he is currently Homewood Professor in the Arts at Johns Hopkins University, and has lived in Baltimore, USA, since 2015. Gravity Archives (2026), his fifteenth collection, was described in the Observer as a ‘bold new chapter in his six-decade career’. Author photo © Aisha Butler Photography
