Liz Lochhead

First Book: Memo for Spring (Reprographia, 1972)
Awards: Memo for Spring won a 1972 Scottish Arts Council Award; the script of her adaptation of Euripides’ Medea won the 2000 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award; she was appointed Glasgow’s Poet Laureate in 2005. Succeeded Edwin Morgan as Scotland's Makar in January 2011.

Liz Lochhead was born in Motherwell in Lanarkshire on 26 December 1947. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art between 1965 and 1970 before teaching fine art in Glasgow and Bristol for over eight years. In the early 1970s she joined Philip Hobsbaum’s writer’s group, other members of which included Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and Tom Leonard. Her first collection of poems, Memo for Spring, was published in 1972 and won a Scottish Arts Council Award. In 1978 she was selected for a Scottish/Canadian Writer’s Exchange fellowship. She abandoned her teaching career and travelled to Canada to become a full-time performance poet, writer and broadcaster, later returning to Scotland. From 1986 to 1987 she was the writer in residence at the University of Edinburgh and in 1988 became writer in residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Regarded as one of Scotland’s most popular dramatists, Liz Lochhead’s plays include Blood and Ice (1982), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987), an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1989), Cuba (1997), Perfect Days (2000) and Good Things (2004). Her adaptation of Moliere’s Tartuffe into Scots was greeted with considerable critical acclaim upon its publication in 1985 and the script of her adaptation of Euripides’ Medea for Theatre Babel won the 2000 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. In 2001 she moved into the world of film, writing the screenplay of Latin for a Dark Room which was screened by the BBC as part of the Tartan Shorts series.

Although she has been variously described throughout the years as a poet, feminist playwright, translator and broadcaster, she has said, 'The most precious thing to me is to be a poet. If I were a playwright, I’d like to be a poet in the theatre.’ Her poetry is as equally thought-provoking and entertaining as her drama, and she often gives live readings to audiences around the country, collaborating with other artists, most notably with the Dundee singer-songwriter Michael Marra. Her verse is characterised by a self-conscious effort to mimic the idioms of speech, adopting a range of spoken styles that include the lyrical use of rap, colloquialisms and even advertising language in an effort to raise the profile of the marginalised voices of both Scots and women. Her most famous poetry collections include Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems 1967–1984 (1984), True Confessions and New Clichés (1985), and Bagpipe Muzak (1991). The Colour of Black and White: Poems 1984-2003 was published by Polygon in 2003.

In 2000 she was presented with an honorary degree by the University of Edinburgh and in 2002 she was awarded an honorary DLitt from the University of St Andrews. She succeeded Edwin Morgan as Glasgow's Poet Laureate in 2005 and then as Scottish Makar in January 2011.

Picture by Graham Clark