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.

Marjorie Lotfi was born in New Orleans, moved to Tehran as a baby with her American mother and Persian father, and fled Iran with one suitcase and an hour’s notice during the Iranian Revolution. After waiting with family for her father’s return in her mother’s tiny hometown in Ohio, she lived in different parts of the US before moving to New York as a young lawyer in 1996 and then back and forth to the UK, settling in the UK in 1999, and in Scotland in 2005. 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, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023.