Grendel Publishing
Stranger in a borrowed land: Lotte Moos and her writing
For many of her 98 years, Lotte Moos was a refugee – first in Paris, where she persuaded her Gestapo-hunted husband to join her, then precariously in London, Moscow and the United States. She returned to Britain on the eve of the Second World War and was arrested by the Security Service, MI5, and locked up in Holloway Prison. All the while she worried about the fate of her parents, left behind in Berlin. Only in the 1960s did she feel she had come home when she and her husband, the economist Siegi Moos, moved to the East End of London and began to write poetry as members of the Hackney Writers’ Workshop at Centerprise in Dalston.
As a poet, she took up the cause of London’s new Asian refugees and lambasted the policies and personalities of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government. With her forthright message, novel use of English idioms and unique delivery, Lotte soon became a star of the London poetry scene. She was anthologized, filmed, featured in a cabaret and one of her stories was analysed by children at a school in Stoke Newington.
In Stranger in a borrowed land: Lotte Moos and her writing, David Perman, friend and publisher of her Collected Poems, tells the story of this fascinating writer and woman – political and satirical, but never grim for (as the reviewer, Gillian Allnutt wrote) “a thread of joy runs through her work.”
“I have now finished the book. I enjoyed it very much. I thought it was well written and gripping. What a story!” – Dinah Livingstone, poet and publisher of Katabasis books
“Stranger in a borrowed land – a fascinating history that made me glad to have known Lotte” – William Oxley, poet and critic
