Scottish poet and playwright Liz Lochhead was born in 1947, in Motherwell, Lanarkshire. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art, then, while working on her earliest collections of poetry, taught art at schools in Glasgow and Bristol for eight years, till in 1978 she went to Canada for a year, after being selected for the first Scottish Writers Exchange Fellowship.

Her first collection of poems, Memo for Spring (Reprographia, 1972), won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, as did Dreaming Frankenstein (Polygon, 1984). She was a recipient of a Cholmondley Award for Poetry, and has already been honoured by both her host institutions, being a Fellow of Glasgow School of Art and an Honorary Doctor of Letters of Glasgow University. She has been similarly honoured by the Universities of Aberdeen, Stirling, Strathclyde, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Dundee, Abertay, of Queen Margaret University College and Glasgow Caledonian University, and is a Fellow of RSAMD and of Glasgow Institute of Art.

In 2001 she was awarded the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award for Medea (Nick Hern Books, 2000). Her poetry collections include Dreaming Frankenstein (Polygon, 1984), True Confessions and New Clichés (Polygon, 1985) Bagpipe Muzak (Penguin, 1991), and The Colour of Black and White: Poems 1984-2003 (Polygon, 2003).

Liz Lochhead lives in Glasgow. She was appointed the city's Poet Laureate in February 2005.

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Related links

› www.contemporarywriters.com

› www.kalwriters.com/archive/lochhead.html

An annotated bibliography of Liz Lochhead's writings by Alison Walker and Craig W. McLuckie