Hands Up for Trad’s Women in Music and Culture 2025 list has been announced to celebrate just some of the women working in Scotland.
Launched as part of International Women’s Day 2025, we shine the spotlight on 12 women who all contribute towards Scotland’s cultural landscape through their work. Read the 2025 list here.
Liz Lochhead was born in Motherwell, Lanarkshire in 1947. She attended the Glasgow School of Art between 1965 and 1970 and, after graduation, worked as a teacher of fine art in Glasgow and Bristol, a career at which she claims to have been “terrible”.
During the 1970s Lochhead was a member of the prestigious writer’s group initiated by Philip Hobsbaum which included the new talents of Alasdair Gray, Tom Leonard and James Kelman. During this period Lochhead was putting her considerable talents to good use in the collection of poems that would later be published as Memo for Spring(1972), which received a Scottish Arts Council Book Award.
Shortly afterwards, in 1978, Lochhead made her first venture into drama with her revue, Sugar and Spite. In this same year her award of the Scottish/Canadian Writers Exchange Fellowship allowed Lochhead to abandon teaching for writing full-time. In 1986 she married the architect, Tom Logan, and they made Glasgow their home.
During her career 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.” Lochhead’s careers as poet and playwright have always been co-existent. Between 1986-7 she was Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University and a year later Writer in Residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In 1981 Lochhead’s third collection of poems, The Grimm Sisters was published and in 1982, her first full-length play, Blood and Ice was performed at the Edinburgh Traverse. Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems (1984) was followed in 1985 by True Confessions and New Cliches.
During the 1980s, Lochhead produced the plays that were to make her name as a Scottish playwright: the critically acclaimed Scots translation of Moliere’s Tartuffe, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (which was performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1987) and Dracula (1989).
The 1990s saw a move away from the more overtly feminist agenda of Lochhead’s early works and into a wider concern with issues of voice in general. 1991 saw the publication of Bagpipe Muzak and a movement into film with the BBC screening of Lochhead’s short film Latin for A Dark Room as part of the Tartan Shorts series. More recently, her adaptation of Euripedes’ Medea won the 2000 Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award and in that same year she was awarded an honorary literary degree from the University of Edinburgh. She has also adapted Moliere’s The Misanthropeinto a satire on the modern Scottish Parliament in the play, Miseryguts (2002), and another collection of poems, The Colour of Black and White was published in 2003.
Lochhead’s 50-year career began with her poetry collection Memo for Spring, and includes her time as Scotland’s first female Makar and her latest collection, A Handsel. Her original plays and adaptations dramatically reflect the shifting times like Mary Queen of Scots Got her Head Chopped Off, Good Things, Perfect Days, Educating Agnes and critically acclaimed Euripides’s Medea.
Currently, Lochhead is feeling inspired by the life and work of Rabbie Burns. As she has said about this passion project, “Something is itching with Burns at the moment. I’m going to write something – not scholarly, because I’m not a scholar. I’m interested in a sort of fictional Edinburgh in the year Burns was there on the make. He was making himself into a rock star.”
Find out more about Liz Lochead here.
Read the Hands Up for Trad’s Women in Music and Culture 2024 List
Hands Up for Trad are an organisation who work with Scottish traditional music, language and culture. If you would like to support our work you can donate here.
Follow these topics: News, Women in Music and Culture