In the Mid-Midwinter by Liz Lochhead ( Grades 1-3)

Elizabeth Anne Lochhead was born in Motherwell, Lanarkshire. Her parents had both served in the army during World War II and married in 1944. Her experience at primary school in Lochhead was the inspiration for her poem ‘A Protestant Girlhood’. She moved on to Dalziel High School in Motherwell, and at 15 had decided to go to art school. Despite her teachers encouraging her to study English at university. Elizabeth wrote her first poem, ‘The Visit’, after she entered the Glasgow School of Art in 1965. After graduating in 1970 she would continue to explore her writing talent in worship. In 1971 she won a Radio Scotland poetry competition, in 1972 she read with Norman MacCaig at a poetry festival in Edinburgh, and her first collection, Memo for Spring, was published in 1972. Alongside with her contemporaries: Alasdair Gray, Jim Kelman, Tom Leonard, Tom McGrath and Alan Spence Elizabeth Lochhead san stands out as a rare female presence and this has been enabling and inspiring for the generation that followed.