Liz Lochhead
(born 1947 - ) - Motherwell
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.
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.
Key Titles
- The Colour Of Black And White
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. - Dreaming Frankenstein & Collected Poems, 1967-1984
This new edition brings together Lochhead's previously published poetic works 'Memo For Spring', 'Islands', 'Grimm Sisters' and 'Dreaming Frankenstein' to provide a complete collection of her poetry from 1967 to 1984, with new material to update it. - Good Things
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. - 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. - Perfect Days
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? - Theatrebabel's Medea
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 - True Confessions And New Clichés
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.
Bibliography
- Riddle-Me-Ree - 1970
- Memo for Spring - 1972
- Alasdair Gray: Retrospective Exhibition (includes poems by Liz Lochhead) - 1974
- Islands - 1978
- Liz Lochhead (Writers in Brief Series: No. 1) - 1978
- The Grimm Sisters - 1981
- Blood and Ice - 1982
- Dreaming of Frankenstein and other Poems - 1984
- Pinball (Methuen Theatrefile Volume 4) - 1985
- Tartuffe: A translation into Scots from the original by Molière - 1985
- True Confessions and New Clichés - 1985
- For Bram Stoker: A Sequence of Poems - 1986
- Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off: and Dracula - 1989
- Bagpipe Muzak - 1991
- Penguin Modern Poets 4 (Liz Lochhead, Roger McGough, Sharon Olds) - 1995
- Three Scottish Poets (Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead) - 1996
- Cuba / Dog House (includes play 'Cuba' by Liz Lochhead) - 1997
- Perfect Days - 1998
- Medea - 2000
- Misery Guts - 2002
- The Colour of Black and White: Poems 1984-2003 - 2005
- Good Things - 2005