Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Liz Lochhead
Standard Name: Lochhead, Liz
Birth Name: Eizabeth Anne Lochhead
Nickname: Liz
LL
, 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.
Lochhead, Liz. Bagpipe Muzak. Penguin.
79, 83-4
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.
Writer Liz Lochhead
comments that these tough, transparent fables of longing, of difficult delight and consolation, are romances in the Shakespearian
sense.
Lochhead, Liz. “Ice”. Mslexia, Vol.
20
, pp. 26-7.
27
Judith Thurman
calls this volume the most Danish of ID
's works...
The sixty poets were each commissioned for a poem marking a particular year. They included Gillian Clarke
(1955: Running Away to the Sea), Ruth Fainlight
(1963: World Events), Liz Lochhead
(1966: Photograph, Art...
Contributors included Gillian Clarke
(with In a Cardiff Arcade, 1952), Jackie Kay
(with Silver Moon, for London's feminist bookshop, 1982-2001), and Liz Lochhead
(for the more general Essentials).
Occupation
Zoë Fairbairns
In 1990 ZF
was giving short courses on writing for women at the Hen House in Lincolnshire (where Liz Lochhead
was also teaching).
“Advertisement”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4548, p. 580.
580
She spent four years in the early twenty-first century serving as...
Literary responses
U. A. Fanthorpe
UAF
's poetry was broadcast on the BBC
's Woman's Hour and selected for Poems on the Underground. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
in 1987, a CBE in...
Friends, Associates
Jackie Kay
Her friendship with a gay man called Alastair Cameron
began during her schooldays. She later became close to a Scottish writer of an older generation, Liz Lochhead
, and liked and admired the yet more...
Textual Production
Jackie Kay
JK
was one of twenty Scottish authors invited to contribute a monologue to a collaborative work entitled Dear Scotland, which was first performed by the Scottish National Theatre
on 24 April 2014 as a...
The National Theatre (Cottesloe)
put on an arresting play for young people by WP
entitled Can You Keep a Secret?, part of the New Connections season of plays for the young.
Launched a couple...
Education
Ali Smith
Of all the experiences in her university career, AS
specifically names readings at Aberdeen by eminent Scottish writers Alasdair Gray
, Jim Kelman
, and Liz Lochhead
as having the kind of vibrancy that splits...
Anthologization
Anne Stevenson
Poetry Quartets no. 6 featured AS
reading and discussing her poems. No. 7 in the series, issued the same day, featured Liz Lochhead
. Each appeared with three male poets.
AS
's close friends have included many well-known late twentieth-century names in British poetry: Frances Horovitz
, whom she mourned in a number of poems, a trio of drinking friends in Glasgow (Tom Leonard
Timeline
20 June to 7 July 2016: British poets Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke,...