About the Author

Andrew Motion was poet laureate in the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009, and is the 2015 winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for his collection Peace Talks. The author of several biographies, he won the Whitbread Prize for Biography for his authorized life of Philip Larkin (1993). He has published a memoir, In the Blood (2006), and two acclaimed young adult novels based on Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island: Silver and The New World. Cofounder of The Poetry Archive, Motion was knighted for services to poetry in 2009. He is currently Homewood Professor in the Arts at Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.