Mother Courage and Her Children

In this new translation of Brecht's great 1939 anti-war play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder by the distinguished Scottish poet Tom Leonard, the Thirty Years War becomes the War on Terror and Mother Courage is a working-class woman from the West of Scotland speaking in the broad, bold Glaswegian dialect. It is a play about the language of politics and the politics of language. <p/>Best known for his early dialectic poems such as 'The Six o'clock News', Tom Leonard has woven into his translation the arguments about culture and society that have run as a thread through all his work for almost fifty years. <p/>Tom Leonard's many books include a fictional biography of James Thomson and a pioneering anthology of neglected nineteenth century Scottish poetry, Radical Renfrew. His Intimate Voices: Selected Works 1965-83 was banned from Central Region school libraries in the same year that it shared the Scottish Book of the Year Award. In 2010 his Outside the Narrative: Poems 1965-2009 was the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year. A collection of his literary and political criticism was recently published as Definite Articles: Selected Prose 1973-2012.