The Wrong Person to Ask
Marjorie Lotfi’s award-winning debut collection is a book of two halves, each a meditation on the idea of home, both the places we start and end up in our lives.
Spanning a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution, through years as a young woman in America, to her current home in Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest.
Winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2021
Winner of the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection 2024 (Forward Prizes)
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2024
Poetry Book Society Special Commendation
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.
