Scottish Writers' Centre In Process Masterclass with Scots Makar Liz Lochhead

Liz Lochhead was born in Motherwell, Lanarkshire in 1947. She wrote her first poem, ‘The Visit’, after she entered the Glasgow School of Art in 1965 and attended an informal creative writing group run by Stephen Mulrine. In 1971 Liz won a Radio Scotland poetry competition, in 1972 she read with Norman MacCaig at a poetry festival in Edinburgh, and her first collection, Memo for Spring was published. She met Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and Tom Leonard in this period and later Tom McGrath and Alan Spence; in this group of talented young Scottish writers, she stands out as a rare female presence and this has been enabling and inspiring for the generations that followed.

The female voices she has deployed in her monologues and her many poems undoubtedly draw on a Scottish oral tradition that nods back to the ballads, is subverted by the music-hall and takes pleasure in a distinctive West of Scotland tradition of storytelling and humour. She has been instrumental in making space for women, and has spoken of the difficulty for female poets. Her voice though is not always that of a woman, or always that of a Scot. Following her friend Edwin Morgan first as Poet Laureate of Glasgow (2005) and as Scots Makar, she does not want to be confined by either her gender or her nationality.

The radio as much as the theatre has been an impetus to creation for Liz and it is her ability to speak with conversational intimacy within a public space that is one of the hallmarks of her work.

undefined