Andrew Motion, FRSL, is an English poet, novelist and biographer who is the current Poet Laureate.

Raised in Stisted near Braintree in Essex, he was educated at Radley. When he was 17, his mother had a riding accident and spent the next nine years in and out of a coma before she died. In the years that followed, he read English at University College, Oxford, and studied the poetry of Edward Thomas for his MLitt. degree. Motion has said that he tried to keep his memory of his mother alive through poetry.