Marjorie Lotfi

Book Week Scotland (BWS) was a fun-filled and hectic time this year for Open Book as we ran shared reading and creative writing workshops with Venture Trust, Grassmarket Community Project, St Joseph’s Care Home and at the Royal Botanic Gardens as part of the programme of events. Looking at the theme of ‘Journeys” based on […]

Open Book founders Marjorie Lotfi and Claire Urquhart found themselves involved on the other side of Edinburgh International Book Festival events when they presented three shared reading workshops as part of the 2015 EIBF programme. Looking at each of Louis De Bernieres short stories, Julian Barnes Sense of an Ending and Simon Armitage poetry in

Open Book’s annual visit to the EIBF 2015 saw more than 50 participants representing a wide variety of organisations travel to Charlotte Square. Visitors from Glasgow Women’s Library, Deaf Action Scotland, Grassmarket Community Project, Venture Trust, St Joseph’s Care Home and Crisis coming together under the Open Book umbrella to enjoy a day of author

Open Book was commissioned by UNESCO City of Literature and Scottish Book Trust to run two shared reading and creative writing sessions around Scotland’s Stories of Home at the Grassmarket Community Project and St Joseph’s Care Home. In both sessions, we read short stories and poems, and responded first with discussion of similar memories of our own.

The Open Book group at the Grassmarket Community Project took part in a focus group commissioned by the Scottish Libraries Information Council to learn more about what people want to get from their local library service.  The discussion was lively and engaged, and full of opinions!  After the session, this word cloud was developed to

On 16 November, Open Book took a group of its readers from St Joseph’s Care Home to hear Marilynne Robinson read from her new book, Lila. Here’s what one of our readers, Eileen, wrote about the event: “A capacity audience filled the Roxburgh Hall, the platform dressed in black stage curtains, with spotlights focussed on a

This year, Open Book took 28 readers (including some volunteers) from two groups to the Edinburgh International Book Festival to hear readings by Sebastian Barry and Max Egremont.  Both days were great fun, and brought to life the reading we’d been doing in the weeks before our outings.

We launched Open Book with a coffee morning in Edinburgh earlier this week, looking for new volunteers and taking donations towards our book fund.  Claire and I had been secretly calling it our ‘recruitment drive,’ hoping that we would get friends interested in helping us as we look towards expanding our efforts in the coming