The Black Box, 18 – 22 Hill Street, Belfast
Part of Between The Lines 2009
Bernard MacLaverty
Born in Belfast in 1942, Bernard MacLaverty moved to Scotland in 1975. He has been a Medical Laboratory Technician, a mature student, a teacher of English and, for two years in the mid 1980s, Writer-in-Residence at the University of Aberdeen. Having lived in Edinburgh and Islay he now lives in Glasgow. Bernard MacLaverty is a member of Aosdána and Visiting Writer/Professor at the University of Strathclyde. Currently he is employed as a teacher of creative writing on a postgraduate course in prose fiction run by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He has published five collections of short stories such as Secrets and other Stories (1977) and A Time to Dance & Other Stories (1982); his four highly acclaimed novels include Lamb (1980), Cal (1983), Grace Notes (1997), short listed for the Booker Prize, and The Anatomy School (2001). Bernard MacLaverty has also written versions of his fiction for other media – radio plays, television plays, screenplays and recently he wrote and directed a short film Bye-Child. His Matters of Life & Death (2006) is simply a ‘great book’.
Liz Lochhead
Scottish poet and playwright, Liz Lochhead was born in Motherwell (1947). She studied at the Glasgow School of Art and taught before becoming Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University (1986-7) at the Royal Shakespeare Company (1988). Her first poetry collection, Memo for Spring (1972), won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award; poetry collections include Dreaming Frankenstein (1984), True Confessions and New Clichés (1985) Bagpipe Muzak (1991), and The Colour of Black and White: Poems 1984-2003 (2003).
A performer as well as a poet, Liz Lochhead’s revue Sugar and Spite was staged in 1978. Highly acclaimed plays include Blood and Ice (1982), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989), Dracula (1989), Cuba (1997) and Perfect Days (1998). She has translated and adapted Molière’s Tartuffe (1985) into Scots and her adaptation of Euripides’ Medea (2000) won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. In Misery Guts (2002), based on The Misanthrope, Lochhead updated the original play, while her Latin for a Dark Room, a short film, was screened at the 1994 Edinburgh International Film Festival and The Story of Frankenstein appeared on Yorkshire Television.
Liz Lochhead’s recent work includes a musical collaboration with Michael Marra called In Flagrant Delicht (2004) and a romantic comedy for the stage, Good Things (2006).