Liz Lochhead

(born 1947 - ) - Motherwell

Liz Lochhead

Liz Lochhead is one of Scotland’s best-known poets and dramatists, with her books and poetry attracting both critical and commercial success. She is also a tireless performer and screenwriter, performing all over the UK and overseas.

Born in Motherwell, Lanarkshire, in 1947, she taught art in schools before embarking on a writing career. She formed part of the now famous Glasgow writer’s group of the 1970s, centred around Philip Hobsbaum at Glasgow University, along with the writers, James Kelman, Tom Leonard, and Alasdair Gray.

She has won numerous awards and bursaries, beginning with a Scottish Arts Council award for Memo for Spring in 1972, and more recently with Medea, which won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2000. In January 2011 Liz Lochhead was awarded the position of Scots Makar, which had been vacant since the death of Edwin Morgan.

Her plays have been performed at the Edinburgh Festival and elsewhere: Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off and the translations from Moliere into Scots were particularly well received.

Lochhead manages to bridge the gap between the literary and the popular with her lively, witty takes on modern life and relationships, particularly her poems on the lot of modern women. The language she employs is redolent with everyday speech patterns and idioms.

  • Cover scan of A Choosing
    A Choosing: The Selected Poems Of Liz Lochhead - Paperback
    During her career Liz Lochhead had been described variously as a poet, feminist playwright, translator and broadcaster. This volume contains a selection of her work.
  • Cover scan of The Colour Of Black And White
    The Colour Of Black And White - Paperback
    This is Liz Lochhead's first collection of poems for more than 12 years and, for her, the most important since the award-winning 'Dreaming Frankenstein' and 'Collected poems' in 1984.
  • Cover scan of Dracula
    Dracula - Paperback
    Adapted from Bram Stoker's original story, Liz Lochhead has produced a faithful stage version of the famous tale.
  • Cover scan of Educating Agnes
    Educating Agnes: A New Adaptation Of Molière's L'ecole Des Femmes - Paperback
    Arnolphe, middle-aged man-about-town, has deliberately kept his young ward, Agnes, innocent of the ways of the world. Now she is 18, he intends to marry her, but hasn't told her yet. She meanwhile has fallen for young Horace, newly in town.
  • Cover scan of Good Things
    Good Things - Paperback
    The latest play from Liz Lochhead. Susan, suddenly single and staring the dreaded 5-0 in the face, has an ex who, unfortunately, still has the power to wound, an ailing elderly father and an adolescent daughter.
  • Cover scan of Mary Queen Of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off
    Mary Queen Of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off - Paperback
    Liz Lochhead's play about Mary Queen of Scots, revised and with a new introduction, is an iconoclastic take on a famous historical subject, which is much used by schools and drama groups.
  • Cover scan of Misery Guts
    Misery Guts: Two Plays By Molière
    In Misery Guts Liz Lochhead transposes the setting of Molière's most famous play, Le Misanthrope, to present-day Scotland - and instantly injects the zest and vigour of her own comedies.
  • Cover scan of Perfect Days
    Perfect Days - Paperback
    This play, set in Glasgow, follows the successful celebrity hairdresser, Barbs Marshall. She has her own TV show, a nice flat in the city, but she's 39 and her biological clock is ticking. Will she find someone willing to oblige her?
  • Cover scan of Theatrebabel's Medea
    Theatrebabel's Medea - Paperback
    Medea is a blazing new version of Euripides' searing drama of infanticide. Following well received performances in Glasgow's Tramway in March, Medea comes to the Edinburgh Festival in the Theatre Babel production starring Maureen Beattie
  • Cover scan of True Confessions And New Clichés
    True Confessions And New Clichés - Paperback
    In this book, Liz Lochhead has brought together a selection of the best of her raps, songs, sketches and monologues from her plays and revues.

Internet Links

Interviews

Liz Lochhead's Bibliography