Marjorie Lotfi

Marjorie Lotfi 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 (Bloodaxe Books, 2023) is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

She has been the Poet in Residence at Jupiter Artland, Spring Fling and the Wigtown Book Festival. She was commissioned to write Pilgrim, a sequence about migration between Iran and the US, for the St Magnus Festival in Orkney, and by the University of Edinburgh to write a European/female/migration counterpart, some of which appears in The Wrong Person to Ask. Her pamphlet Refuge, poems about her childhood in revolutionary Iran, was published by Tapsalteerie Press in 2018.

Marjorie also founded the Belonging Project, considering the experiences of 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.