Serving as the first female Makar - or National Poet of Scotland - from 2011 to 2016, Liz Lochhead's poetry is bold, adventurous and has a definite feminist streak that runs through it. Over the course of her successful career, she has adopted and experimented with different styles and genres, continually exciting her readers with new and original material.
Hailing from industrial Lanarkshire, her poems deal with everything from the everyday to the once in a blue moon (whisky and the theatre through to the opening of the Scottish Parliament), and we encounter her narrators sometimes alone, sometimes with loved ones or friends. Alive to the world around her and Scotland's vibrant literary tradition, alongside her writing, Lochhead has helped to blaze a trail for younger female poets; indeed, the poet Jackie Kay succeeded her as Makar last year. As Lochhead writes in her poem 'Poets need not', 'All honour goes to poetry', and it seems that that is one maxim that she has lived and worked by ever since starting out as a poet.
