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Andrew Motion was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009; he is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and co-founder of the online Poetry Archive. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, and has published four celebrated biographies. His group study The Lamberts won the Somerset Maugham Award and his authorised life of Philip Larkin won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Andrew Motion's novella The Invention of Dr Cake (2003) was described as 'amazingly clever' by the Irish Times and praised for 'brilliant and almost hallucinatory vividness' by the Sunday Telegraph. His memoir, In the Blood (2006), was described as 'the most moving and exquisitely written account of childhood loss I have ever read' in the Independent on Sunday. His most recent collection of poems, The Cinder Path (2009), was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Andrew Motion was knighted for his services to poetry in 2009.
Our Poet Laureate has one foot in fiction, one in biography, in this intriguing though somewhat sluggish 'autobiography' of T G Wainewright - painter, essayist, friend of Romantic luminaries such as Lamb and Fuseli, convicted forger, and supposed murderer. Following Wainewright's life, Motion traces the trajectory between two views of selfhood - on the one hand, self-image and aspiration; on the other, the core left behind when reputation and the outlet for literary and artistic talent have been stripped away, replaced by cruel punishment as a convict in Tasmania. Motion captures the character of the man and his age in prose that is a wonder of historical reconstruction. Yet his avoidance of pure invention and his two-strand structure with historical footnotes after each chapter have led to some oddities - it is strange to read of the horrors of Newgate prison in a long footnote rather in the main narrative, and no less so to have only a paragraph on a period of vagrancy in France. Worth reading, however, for some stunning passages of melancholy lyricism: 'I imagined the black crows rising in one mighty flock, travelling off elsewhere, borne upon the winds of the world, so that wherever I landed, they would be sure to have arrived there before me, and would certainly have sounded my name in their filthy voices, meaning that I could never hold up my head as I once did, or possess myself again'. (Kirkus UK)
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