“And what is home if not the choice – over and over again – to stay?”
A poet, essayist and memoirist
On being both (and neither)
You end up tribeless and in the water, wherever that might be
Marjorie Lotfi in conversation with Colin Grant
Marjorie Lotfi reflects on her journey towards becoming a writer, from fleeing Iran as a child in 1978 to arriving in Scotland via the USA.
Biography
Marjorie Lotfi is the winner of this year’s Forward Prize for Best First Collection for her debut, The Wrong Person to Ask (Bloodaxe Books, 2023). She was born in New Orleans, moved to Tehran as a baby with her American mother and Persian father, and fled to the USA during the Iranian Revolution. She settled in the UK in 1999 and has lived in Edinburgh since 2005. Marjorie was also joint winner of the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize in 2021.
Marjorie is one of the British Council/UNESCO Cities of Literature 2024 ILX 10 ‘Rising Stars of UK Writing’. Her poetry has won awards, been published widely in journals and anthologies in the UK and US (including The Rialto, Gutter, Ambit, Magma, Rattle and Staying Human), and been included in Best Scottish Poems 2021 and in London’s Poems on the Underground. She’s currently finishing a memoir about her interrupted childhood in Iran and subsequent arrival in a small town in Ohio.
A former corporate lawyer in New York and London, Marjorie later founded the Belonging Project (considering the experiences of refugees with over 1,500 participants) and is now Co-Founder and Director of Open Book, which runs over 1,000 shared reading and creative writing workshops each year across Scotland.
