Sir Andrew Motion, FRSL (born 26 October 1952) is an English poet, novelist and biographer, who presided as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009.

Motion was appointed Poet Laureate on 1 May 1999, following the death of Ted Hughes, the previous incumbent. The Nobel Prize-winning Northern Irish poet and translator Seamus Heaney had ruled himself out for the post. Breaking with the tradition of the laureate retaining the post for life, Motion stipulated that he would stay for only ten years. The yearly stipend of £200 was increased to £5,000 and he received the customary butt of sack.[9]
He wanted to write poems about things in the news, and commissions from people or organisations involved with ordinary life, rather than be seen a courtier. So, he wrote for the TUC about liberty, about homelessness for the Salvation Army, about bullying for ChildLine, about the foot and mouth outbreak for the Today programme, about the Paddington rail disaster, the 11 September attacks and Harry Patch for the BBC, and more recently about shell shock for the charity Combat Stress, and climate change for the song cycle Ive finished for Cambridge University with Peter Maxwell Davies.[10] In 2003, Motion wrote Regime change, a poem in protest at Invasion of Iraq from the point of view of Death walking the streets during the conflict,[11][12] and in 2005, Spring Wedding in honour of the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Camilla Parker Bowles. Commissioned to write in the honour of 109 year old Harry Patch, the last surviving Tommy to have fought in World War I, Motion composed a five part poem, read and received by Patch at the Bishops Palace in Wells in 2008.[13] As laureate, he also founded the Poetry Archive an on-line library of historic and contemporary recordings of poets reciting their own work.[14]
Motion remarked that he found some of the duties attendant to the post of poet laureate difficult and onerous and that the appointment had been very, very