Liz Lochhead

Liz Lochhead (born 26 December 1947) is a Scottish poet, playwright, translator and broadcaster. Between 2011 and 2016 she was the Makar, or National Poet of Scotland.

Elizabeth Anne Lochhead was born in a “little ex-mining village just outside Motherwell”,Lanarkshire. Her mother and father had both served in the army during the Second World War, and later, her father was a local government clerk. In 1952 the family moved into a new council house in the mining village of Newarthill, where her sister was born in 1957. Though she was encouraged by her teachers to study English, Lochhead was determined to go to Glasgow School of Art where she studied between 1965 and 1970. After graduation Lochhead taught art at High Schools in Glasgow and Bristol, a career at which she says she was "terrible"

Having written poetry as a child and whilst studying at Art School, Liz Lochhead won a BBC Scotland Poetry Competition in 1971 and Gordon Wright published her first collection of Poetry, Memo For Spring in 1972 under his Reprographia imprint.

It is often claimed that at this time Lochhead was part of a Philip Hobsbaum writers' group, a crucible of creative activity – with other members including Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Tom Leonard, Aonghas MacNeacail and Jeff Torrington, Liz Lochhead has repeatedly claimed this to be an invention. She has however recalled the support and inspiration she drew from the Scottish poetry scene of the early 1970s and meetings with the elder generation - Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch - and with contemporaries such as Leonard, Kelman and Gray. Lochhead went on to produce revue shows with Leonard and Gray, including Tickly Mince, and The Pie of Damocles. Other the following years Lochhead published further collections Islands (1978) and The Grimm Sisters (1979) and moved first to Toronto as part of the first Scottish/Canadian writers exchange and later made her home in New York. In 1986 she returned permanently to Glasgow.

Lochhead’s success in poetry was rivaled by her writing for the theatre. Her plays include Blood and Ice (1982), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987), Perfect Days (2000) and a highly acclaimed adaptation into Scots of Molière's Tartuffe (1985). She adapted the medieval texts of the York Mystery Plays, performed by a largely amateur cast at York Theatre Royal in 1992 and 1996. Her adaptation of Euripides' Medea won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001. Her plays have been performed on BBC Radio 4: Blood and Ice (11 June 1990), The Perfect Days (16 May 1999), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (11 February 2001) and The Stanley Baxter Playhouse: Mortal Memories (26 June 2006). Her adaptation of Helen Simpson's short story Burns and the Bankers was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Burns Night, 25 January 2012. Her plays Educating Agnes and Thebans premiered in the early 2000s, and in 2011 as part of the Glasgay Festival, Liz Lochhead's play Edwin Morgan's Dreams and Other Nightmares premiered at the Tron and it was revived three years later as part of the cultural celebrations for the commonwealth games. She has produced many new works for the Oran Mor in Glasgow, including Mortal Memories (2012) and Between the Thinks Bubble and the Speech Balloon (2014) with Tom Leonard, William Letford, Grace Cleary, and Henry Bell.

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