Having written poetry as a child and whilst studying at Art School, Lochhead won a BBC Scotland Poetry Competition in 1971,[8] and Gordon Wright published her first collection of Poetry, Memo For Spring in 1972 under his Reprographia imprint.[5]
It is often claimed that at this time Lochhead was part of a Philip Hobsbaum writers' group, a crucible of creative activity – with other members including Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Tom Leonard, Aonghas MacNeacail and Jeff Torrington,[9] Liz Lochhead has repeatedly claimed this to be an invention.[5] She has however recalled the support and inspiration she drew from the Scottish poetry scene of the early 1970s and meetings with the elder generation - Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch – and with contemporaries such as Leonard, Kelman and Gray.[10] Lochhead went on to produce revue shows with Leonard and Gray, including Tickly Mince,[11] and The Pie of Damocles.[12] Other the following years Lochhead published further collections Islands (1978) and The Grimm Sisters (1979) and moved first to Toronto as part of the first Scottish/Canadian writers exchange and later made her home in New York.[8] In 1986 she returned permanently to Glasgow.[8]
Lochhead's success in poetry was rivalled by her writing for the theatre.[8] Her plays include Blood and Ice (1982), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987), Perfect Days (2000) and a highly acclaimed adaptation into Scots of Molière's Tartuffe (1985). She adapted the medieval texts of the York Mystery Plays, performed by a largely amateur cast at York Theatre Royal in 1992 and 1996.[13] Her adaptation of Euripides' Medea won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001. Her plays have been performed on BBC Radio 4: Blood and Ice (11 June 1990), The Perfect Days (16 May 1999), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (11 February 2001) and The Stanley Baxter Playhouse: Mortal Memories (26 June 2006). Her adaptation of Helen Simpson's short story Burns and the Bankers was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Burns Night, 25 January 2012.[14] Her plays Educating Agnes and Thebans premiered in the early 2000s,[15] and in 2011 as part of the Glasgay Festival, Liz Lochhead's play Edwin Morgan's Dreams and Other Nightmares premiered at the Tron[16] and it was revived three years later as part of the cultural celebrations for the commonwealth games.[17] She has produced many new works for the Oran Mor in Glasgow, including Mortal Memories (2012) and Between the Thinks Bubble and the Speech Balloon (2014) with Tom Leonard, William Letford, Grace Cleary, and Henry Bell.
Like her work for theatre, her poetry is alive with vigorous speech idioms; later collections include True Confessions and New Clichés (1985), Bagpipe Muzak (1991), Dreaming Frankenstein: and Collected Poems (1984), The Colour of Black and White (2003) and A Choosing (2011). Liz Lochhead also enjoys writing songs and combining poetry with music and she has collaborated with Dundee singer-songwriter Michael Marra to whom she dedicated the poem 'Ira and George'.[18] as well as providing guest vocals on the track 'Trouble is Not a Place' from the 2014 EP The Bird That Never Flew by Glaswegian experimental hip hop group Hector Bizerk.[19] She has also collaborated extensively with saxophonist Steve Kettley and Dundonian band The Hazey Janes.[20]
Lochhead performs internationally in theatres and literary festivals, as well as appearing regularly at nights around Glasgow and Edinburgh.
