The Makar, Liz Lochhead, called for more Scottish plays to be performed by the National Theatre of Scotland as she spoke at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Lochhead in an interview with literary magazine Gutter, published last week, said that it was a "great pity" that "there's a shortage of Scottish people working in the National Theatre of Scotland", comments that led to some controversy in the past week.

At an event at the book festival she said she hoped the NTS would stage works by Edwin Morgan, Gerry Mulgrew and other Scottish playwrights.

Speaking in conversation with Ruth Wishart, said her words had been "wilfully misunderstood."

Lochhead said she had been upset by the furore and added: "I love the work that the National Theatre of Scotland has done, but I do not see why we shouldn't have more work that also includes some of the great Scottish works of the recent past, for instance, Edwin Morgan's translation of Cyrano de Bergerac.

"I was part of the working party for the National Theatre of Scotland and part of the remit was to revive recent classics like that, like perhaps my own version of Medea which had won the Saltire Prize, largely because of the wonderful performance of the great Maureen Beattie.

"I would also loved them to have picked up on - and I hope isn't harming his career to give him a puff - the great Daniel Jackson who wrote a wonderful trilogy, which is as good as John Byrne's Slab Boys trilogy."

She said she could not believe the NTS had not "sniffed the vigour" in Jackson's works The Wall, The Ducky and The Chooky Brae.

Lochhead added: "I don't know why I was so fiercely criticised, I said I would like more Scottish repertoire at the Scottish theatre.

"I was not criticising anybody - I really like Laurie Sansom [artistic director of NTS] and the fact that he is not Scottish does not matter if they have someone there looking after the Scottish side of the repertoire and who knows about Edwin Morgan's plays... or if people knew of the great work that Gerry Mulgrew of Communicado Theatre has done.

"It's ridiculous that he as not had a commission to do a great big national theatre thing.

"Sir David McVicar didn't get an answer when he offered to do something - I love what they do, but there are other things they need to do as well."