Thebans

Liz Lochhead is a poet, playwright, performer and broadcaster.Her original stage plays include Thon Man Molière, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, Blood and Ice, Good Things and Perfect Days. Her many stage adaptations include Dracula, Molière’s Tartuffe, Miseryguts (based on Le Misanthrope) and Educating Agnes (based on L’École des Femmes); as well as versions of Medea by Euripides (for which she won the Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001), and Thebans (adapted mainly from Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone).Her collections of poetry include Dreaming Frankenstein, The Colour of Black & White, A Choosing (Selected Poems), Fugitive Colours and True Confessions, a collection of monologues and theatre lyrics. She served a five-year term as Scotland's Makar, or National Poet, from 2011 till 2016, and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2015. She won the Sunday Herald Scottish Culture Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, and the 2023 Saltire Society Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to Scottish literature.

'An impressive and sometimes thrilling achievement... a spine-tingling sense of deep connection with the work of dramatists who died more than two millennia ago'