LIZ LOCHHEAD
SCOTLAND’S MAKAR 2011-2016 May 2016: Fugitive Colours (NEW COLLECTION) Also available: A Choosing: The Selected Poems of Liz Lochhead (2011); The Colour of Black and White (2005); Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems (2003); True Confessions and New Cliches (2003) Who is Liz Lochhead? Scottish poet and playwright Liz Lochhead was born in Motherwell in 1947. She is a Fellow of Glasgow School of Art, an Honorary Doctor of Letters of Glasgow University, a Fellow of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and of Glasgow Institute of Art, and is an Honorary President of the Scottish Poetry Library. 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). Her plays include Tartuffe (Polygon, 1986), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (Penguin, 1989) and the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award-winning Medea (Nick Hern Books, 2000). Liz Lochhead lives in Glasgow.
Author based Glasgow Willing to travel: Anywhere in the UK Happy to do: Bookstore and external events, festivals large and small Recent events: Edinburgh International Book Festival; Hay Festival; international festivals Live Literature Funded: Yes
About Fugitive Colours: This stunning new collection features never-before published work along with poems written during her time as Scots Makar, and marks the end of her term as Scotland’s Poet Laureate (2011-2016). Whether commissioned works, such as ‘Connecting Cultures’, written for the Commonwealth Games in 2014 or more personal works, ‘Favourite Place’, about holidays in the west coast with her late husband, this collection is beautiful, sensitive and brilliant. Throughout her career Liz Lochhead has been described variously as a poet, feminist-playwright, translator and broadcaster but has said that ‘when somebody asks me what I do I usually say writer. The most precious thing to me is to be a poet. If I were a playwright, I’d like to be a poet in the theatre.’ Praise for Liz Lochhead: ‘Human relationships, especially as seen from a woman’s point of view, are central: attraction, pain, acceptance, loss, triumphs and deceptions, habits and surprises; always made immediate through a storyteller’s concrete detail of place or voice or object or colour remembered or imagined’ – Edwin Morgan ‘Dreaming Frankenstein is a rare thing: a book of poems which sparkles’ – The Scotsman
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