An Interview with Liz Lochhead

An essential reference in contemporary Scottish literature, Liz Lochhead has consolidated her career as a poet, playwright and performer since she began publishing in the 1970s. Born in Motherwell, Lanarkshire, in 1947, she went to Glasgow School of Art where she started writing. After some eight years teaching art in Glasgow and Bristol, she travelled to Canada (1978) with a Scottish Writers Exchange Fellowship and became a professional writer. Memo for Spring (1971), her first collection of poems, won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and inaugurated both a prolific career and the path many other Scottish women writers would follow afterwards. As a participant in several workshops—Stephen Mulrine's, Philip Hobsbaum's and Tom McGrath's—where other contemporary writers like Alasdair Gray, Tom Leonard or James Kelman also collaborated, Lochhead began to create a prestigious space of her own within a markedly masculine canon. Her works have been associated with the birth of a female voice in Scottish literature and both her texts and performances have had general success in Britain and abroad. Her plays include Blood and Ice (1982), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989), Perfect Days (1998), and adaptations like Molière's Tartuffe (1985) and Miseryguts (The Misanthrope) (2002), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1989), Euripides' Medea (2000), which won the 2001 Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award, Chekhov's Three Sisters (2000) and Euripides and Sophocles' lives of Oedipus, Jokasta and Antigone in Thebans (2003). She has recently published a collection of poems, The Cobur of Black and White (2003), with new and old texts from previous collections like Dreaming Frankenstein (1984), True Confessions and New Clichés (1985) and Bagpipe Muzak (1991). She was Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University (1986-1987) and also at the Royal Shakespeare Company (1988) and was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Edinburgh in 2000. Liz Lochhead lives in the West End of Glasgow, where this interview took place, as part of the research for my Ph.D., in January 2004.