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Marjorie Lotfi Her pamphlet Refuge, poems about her childhood in revolutionary Iran, was published by Tapsalteerie Press in 2018. 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 in Orkney. 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, was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2024.
The Wrong Person to Ask by Marjorie Lotfi is a wondrous treasure - elegant poems of great tenderness and detail, vivid in heart and imagery, mesmerising in power. Whole worlds and people shimmer alive through scenes and stories of exile, departure, arrival, but most importantly, clear witness and remembrance. A deeply honouring book fully built of love. -- Naomi Shihab Nye In this unforgettable and assured debut collection, Lotfi explores issues of belonging and identity - firstly the lost world of an Iranian childhood through the eyes of a young refugee and ultimately the found worlds of America and Scotland. She brilliantly illustrates the little tragedies of global politics by focussing on the luminous, ordinary rituals of daily life. These are poems built both to haunt and reaffirm us; poems of the living, breathing world and our overarching right to find a home in it. -- John Glenday
