Marjorie Lotfi is the winner of the 2024 Forward Prize for Best First Collection for her debut, The Wrong Person to Ask (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), and 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 including The Rialto, Gutter, Ambit, Magma, Rattle and Staying Human, and has been included in Best Scottish Poems 2021 and London’s Poems on the Underground.
A former corporate lawyer, 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. 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.
