Past event

The Andrew Carnegie Lecture Series: Sir Andrew Motion FRSL Poetry and the Subject

Development invites you to hear from Sir Andrew Motion FRSL as part of The Andrew Carnegie Lecture Series for his talk titled “Poetry and the Subject”.

Andrew Motion read English at Oxford University where he won the Newdigate Prize and studied the work of Edward Thomas — an abiding influence.

At Hull University he taught English and worked alongside Philip Larkin, another acknowledged mentor, whose official biographer he later became.

Motion edited the Poetry Review, before becoming Poetry Editor at Chatto and Windus and, from 1996, Chair of the Arts Council of England's Literature Panel. From 1995 to 2003 he was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and from 2003 to 2015 he held the same position at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

In 1999 he was appointed UK Poet Laureate, serving until 2009 as a high-profile champion of poetry as well as Founder/Director of the Poetry Archive to 2016.

The figure of the soldier appears in many of his poems; Motion has spent time with those who have served in wars from WWII to more recently in Afghanistan, and with their loved ones, bearing witness in his writing to their experiences of death and survival. His deep, campaigning interest in protecting the landscape and the environment form important themes in his poems and have also been given voice in his work for the Campaign to Protect Rural England, where he served as President from 2008 to 2016.

Andrew Motion's own writing stands alongside his commitment to education and to making poetry accessible to all. ‘Poetry by Heart' — the national competition he co-founded as part of the Archive –has inspired hundreds of school-aged young people across the UK to learn and recite poetry. Motion is also the author of two novels for young adults, Silver and The New World, both riffs on Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.

His awards include The Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Award, the Somerset Maughan Award and the Whitbread Biography Award. He was knighted for his services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2009. That same year, his biography of John Keats became the basis for the Cannes Film Festival Palme D'Or nominated film ‘Bright Star', directed by Jane Campion.

Andrew Motion now lives in Baltimore, USA, where he is currently Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University.

All welcome. Doors open at 5.15pm.
(There is no registration required to attend this event).