New Makar Liz goes for the Burns

Liz Lochhead looks to Robert Burns for some inspiration after she was announced as the new Makar, Scotland's National Poet, at the National Library of Scotland.

The announcement was made by the First Minister Alex Salmond and former First Ministers Lord McConnell and Henry McLeish.

Ms Lochhead, who will undertake her first official engagement this Friday when she opens the new Burns Museum in Alloway, will replace Edwin Morgan, who died last year.

She said: "I am as delighted as I am surprised by this enormous honour. I accept it on behalf of poetry itself, which is, and always has been, the core of our culture, and in grateful recognition of the truth that poetry - the reading of it, the writing of it, the saying it out loud, the learning of it off by heart - matters deeply to ordinary Scottish people."