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Liz Lochhead

Kirsty Young interviews poet and playwright Liz Lochhead.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer and poet Liz Lochhead.

She was the Makar, the Scottish national poet, between 2011 and 2016.

Liz was born in Motherwell, not far from Glasgow, in 1947. She was always drawing at school and so decided to study at the Glasgow School of Art, where she didn't enjoy the drawing, but did start writing.

After winning a poetry competition, she started performing her poems at readings in Scotland. She published her first pamphlet of poetry, Memo for Spring, in 1972, after a publisher heard her at a reading.

After her second volume of poetry was published in 1978 and she won the first Scottish/Canadian Writers' Exchange Fellowship which took her to Toronto for a year, she was able to give up her job as an art teacher and start writing full time.

From the early 1980s, she started writing plays as well as poetry, and has also adapted classic Greek and French plays for the stage.

She was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2015.

Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Available now

35 minutes

Last on

Fri 19 May 2017 09:00
Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4

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Music Played

  • Joni Mitchell

    All I Want

    • Blue.
    • Warner.

  • CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE

    • Michael Marra & Mr. McFall’s Chamber

      Green Grow the Rashes, O

      • Michael Marra with Mr McFall's Chamber: Recorded Live on Tour 2010.
      • Delphian.

  • Bob Dylan with Johnny Cash

    Girl From the North Country

    • Nashville Skyline.
    • Columbia.

  • Michael Marra

    Mother Glasgow (Live)

    • High Sobriety (Live at the Bonar Hall).
    • Inner City Sound Records.

  • Dusty Springfield

    Goin' Back

    • GoinÂ’ Back.
    • Mercury.

  • Hoagy Carmichael

    Some Days There Just AinÂ’t No Fish

    • In Person 1949-55.
    • AVID Entertainment.

  • Marvin Gaye

    I Heard It Through The Grapevine

    • The Best of Marvin Gaye.
    • Universal-Island Records.

  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

    Là ci darem la mano

    Performer: Ferrucio Furlanetto. Performer: Joan Rodgers. Orchestra: Berliner Philharmoniker. Conductor: Daniel Barenboim.
    • Don Giovanni.
    • Erato.

  • BOOK CHOICE

    Lying Under the Apple Tree by Alice Munro

  • LUXURY ITEM

    Child’s art set with paints, crayons and glitter and glue

Credits

Presenter Kirsty Young
Interviewed Guest Liz Lochhead
Producer Sarah Taylor

Broadcasts

  • Sun 14 May 2017 11:15
    Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4
  • Fri 19 May 2017 09:00
    Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4

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