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. 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.