Liz Lochhead was the second Makar, or National Poet of Scotland, from 2011 till 2016. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, 2015. A performance-poet as well as a poet for the page, she is also a playwright, broadcaster and very occasional theatre director.
Since her first full length play Blood and Ice in 1982 for Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, she has written more a score more – both original works, the best known of which are possibly Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, and Perfect Days, as well as many acclaimed adaptations from the greats of world drama. These include the three great comedies in rhyming couplets of Moliere, Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope (as Miseryguts) and School for Wives (as Educating Agnes) and award-winning adaptations of Greek tragedies such as Euripides Medea and Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone under the title Thebans.
In the last two or three years Polygon have published both a 50th anniversary facsimile collection of her groundbreaking first collection, Memo for Spring from 1972 and A Handsel, her Collected Poems.