Andrew Motion was born in 1952 and read English at University College, Oxford. From 1976 to 1980 he taught English at the University of Hull; from 1980 to 1982 he edited Poetry Review, and from 1982 to 1989 was Editorial Director and Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus. He is a member of the Arts Council of England and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has been the recipient of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Dylan Thomas Award and the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Andrew Motion was appointed Poet Laureate in May 1999 and is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is the author of nine books of poems - most recently, Public Property (2002) - and won considerable acclaim for his biographies of Keats and Philip Larkin. His most recent book, The Invention of Dr Cake (2003), was described as a novella of 'brilliant and almost hallucinatory vividness' (Sunday Telegraph), and as 'an engrossing meditation on life and death and the role of poetry' (Irish Times).