Liz Lochhead, a contemporary Scottish poet and dramatist, has written a number of sketches, monologues, revues, and full-length plays (some of them adapted from canonical works of the past). She names the Glasgow poet
Edwin Morgan as a poetic inspiration.
She writes about the glitzy modern world of high commerce and humdrum poverty, the failure of emotional response, the selling of heritage. Her fictional characters, most of them women, are seldom lovable and often sharply funny. Although her individual works may seem slight, they resonate powerfully.
Milestones
26 December 1947 Elizabeth Anne Lochhead (LL) was born at
Motherwell in
Lanarkshire, the elder of two daughters.
1971 Before she had published a collected volume of her verse, LL won a
BBC Radio Scotland poetry prize for
"Revelation" and "Poem for Other Poor Fools".
May 1984 LL published at
Edinburgh Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems, which reprinted the contents of her earlier volumes together with some new poems.
After April 2003 LL's publishers, Polygon, brought out a new edition (with dates added to its title) of her 1984 volume, now entitled
Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems 1967-1984.
