The University of Glasgow and Glasgow School of Art, with the support of the Scottish Arts Council, have appointed Glasgow's Poet Laureate Liz Lochhead to the post of Writer-in-Residence.

Liz will be working on projects of her own during the residency and she will be available to encourage students and staff of both institutions who wish to consult her for advice about their own creative work. There is an opportunity to produce public readings and/or exhibitions in collaboration with the host institutions. Liz will be in residence at GSA and in the Department of Scottish Literature at the University for one day in each working week during the period of tenure, from January 2006.

Liz Lochhead spoke enthusiastically about her new position which she hopes will stimulate students and staff to write in any medium -- poetry, drama, or fiction.

She said: "I feel very honoured and excited to be taking up the post of Writer in Residence at Glasgow School of Art and Glasgow University. This imaginatively structured appointment is a chance to forge new links between GU and GSA by recognizing the common ground between artists in all fields of endeavor in this city''.

The Director of The Glasgow School of Art, Professor Seona Reid, said: 'We are really delighted that Liz Lochhead will take up the post of writer in residence at our two institutions. Liz is, of course, a graduate of GSA and although she identifies these days as a poet and playwright, her visual sensibility means that a rich and relevant dialogue with our staff and students is absolutely assured. We are all looking forward greatly to her time with us"

Professor Alan Riach, Head of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, said: "Having an experienced writer in this position available to the whole university community is such a coup, and will play a important part of our appeal to prospective students. In a university environment where scholarly work is internationally renowned as research-led, where students rightly expect to enter a context in which research is encouraged, we need to signal that creativity and imaginative perception is a key to what is most valuable in all forms of research. "

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NOTES FOR EDITORS: Scottish poet and playwright Liz Lochhead was born in 1947, in Motherwell, Lanarkshire. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art, then, while working on her earliest collections of poetry, taught art at schools in Glasgow and Bristol for eight years, till in 1978 she went to Canada for a year, after being selected for the first Scottish Writers Exchange Fellowship. Since then she has supported herself as a full-time writer, performer and broadcaster-- apart from two or three Writer in Residence Posts back in the nineteen eighties (at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, at Edinburgh University and at the Royal Shakespeare Company).

Her first collection of poems, Memo for Spring, was published in 1972 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, as did Dreaming Frankenstein in 1984. The latter is still in print from Polygon, as is the collection of monologues, lyrics and performance pieces True Confessions, and her most recent collection of poetry, The Colour of Black & White, which came out in 2003. She was a recipient of a Cholmondley Award for Poetry, and has already been honoured by both her host institutions, being a Fellow of Glasgow School of Art and an Honorary Doctor of Letters of Glasgow University. She has been similarly honoured by the Universities of Aberdeen, Stirling, Strathclyde, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Dundee, Abertay, of Queen Margaret University College and Glasgow Caledonian University, and is a Fellow of RSAMD and of Glasgow Institute of Art.

Her dozen original stage plays include: Blood and Ice, first performed at the Traverse in 1982; Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off , first performed by Communicado Theatre Company at the 1987 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Britannia Rules, first seen at the Lyceum in 1998, just after the premiere of her biggest hit by far Perfect Days, which was first performed at the Traverse at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1998, starring Siobhan Redmond. Subsequently it toured extensively and had a successful London West End run. It has been frequently revived and translated. (Currently it is running in Prague.) This, the first of what is a projected trilogy of comedies, all based on crucial choices at the cusp of succeeding decades in the lives of three different ordinary contemporary women, was followed by the second, Good Things, produced last year by Borderline Theatre Company. She wishes to work on the third, as yet untitled, during her tenure at G.U. and G.S.A., as well as to finish Lothian Road a ?dark, contemporary? theatre piece she?s been working on all year.

As a translator and adapter, she made-over Moli?re's Tartuffe into rhyming Scots for Edinburgh?s Royal Lyceum Theatre in 1986. Much performed, it is just about to be revived for a twentieth anniversary gala production at the same theatre in January 2006.

Miseryguts (2002), was another rude and rhyming take on Moli?re, this time of Le Misanthrope, which was, she felt, ?totally faithful yet fitted the updated milieu of here-and-now Edinburgh media, arts and politics like a glove?. The paperback book of the script of her adaptation of Euripides' Medea for Theatre Babel won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001, and Babel?s production, starring Maureen Beattie, won many awards both at home and abroad. Babel also produced Thebans, her version of the Greek trilogy Oedipus/ Jokasta/ Antigone, in 2003. She also did a version of The York Mystery Plays for the city of York Festival in the nineties, and, back at the Lyceum again, a ?radical adaptation? of Chekhov?s The Three Sisters set in a Highland boarding school just after the end of World War Two.

Liz Lochhead lives in Glasgow. She was appointed the city?s Poet Laureate in February 2005.

First published: 2 December 2005