Marjorie Lotfi Editor & Author

Marjorie Lotfi was born in New Orleans, moved to Tehran as a baby with her American mother and Persian father, and fled Iran with one suitcase and an hour’s notice during the Iranian Revolution. She lived in different parts of the US before moving to the UK in 1999, and in Scotland in 2005. Her pamphlet Refuge, poems about her childhood in revolutionary Iran, was published by Tapsalteerie Press in 2018. She was one of the three winners of the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize in 2021, and her first book- length collection, The Wrong Person to Ask, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023. She has been the Poet in Residence at Jupiter Artland, Spring Fling and the Wigtown Book Festival, and was commissioned to write Pilgrim, a sequence about migration between Iran and the US, for the St Magnus Festival on Orkney, and by the University of Edinburgh to write a European/ female/migration counterpart, some of which appears in The Wrong Person to Ask. She also founded the Belonging Project involving refugees with over 1,500 participants across Scotland, and is a co-founder and Director of the charity Open Book. She is an Ignite Fellow with the Scottish Book Trust, one of the 12 Collective of women writers, co-editor of New Writing Scotland, and chair of the board of StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival.