Scottish poet and playwright Liz Lochhead was born in 1947, in Motherwell, Lanarkshire. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art and taught art at schools in Glasgow and Bristol. She was Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University (1986-7) and Writer in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988. Her first collection of poems, Memo for Spring, was published in 1972 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her poetry has been published in a number of collections including Penguin Modern Poets 4 (1995).

Her plays include Blood and Ice (1982), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989), Dracula (1989), Cuba (1997), a play for young people commissioned by the Royal National Theatre for the BT National Connections Scheme; and Perfect Days (1998), a romantic comedy. Her most recent play is Educating Agnes, produced by Citizens Theatre in Glasgow in 2008.

She has translated and adapted Molière's Tartuffe (1985) into Scots, and the script of her adaptation of Euripides' Medea (2000) won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. In her play Misery Guts (2002), based on Molière's The Misanthrope, the action is updated to the modern-day Scottish Parliament. Her work for television includes Latin for a Dark Room and The Story of Frankenstein.

Liz Lochhead lives in Glasgow, where she was named its Poet Laureate in 2005.