Essay April 2024
On Writing Slowly, and Why the Novel Resists Urgency
The tyranny of productivity culture has not spared writers. Here is an argument for time as material, not obstacle.
Published in Granta
Edinburgh · Literary Fiction
Stories that
linger long after the last page turns.
Seven novels. Multiple languages. Writing that takes its time. The eighth book is being written now.
Most Recent Novel · 2023
The Meridian Hours
ZENA
In the weeks following her mother's death, cartographer Maren Solé begins to notice that the maps she draws no longer match the streets she walks. A novel about grief, the unreliability of memory, and the quiet violence of inheritance — set across Edinburgh, Lisbon, and a coastal town that may or may not exist.
"She has mastered the art of writing about very small things — a hand gesture, a word misheard across a room — and making them feel like the whole weight of a life." — The Times Literary Supplement
Longlisted · Booker Prize 2023 · Translated into eleven languages
The Work
Three novels,
written in earnest.
2020
What the Estuary Holds
Two sisters return to a coastal childhood neither can honestly remember.
Read more →
2017
Before the City Woke
A debut novel set in the last hours of a night that changes everything.
Read more →“She has mastered the art of writing about very small things — a hand gesture, a word misheard across a room — and making them feel like the whole weight of a life.”
— The Times Literary Supplement
Between Novels
Essays &
Short Fiction
The smaller rooms of a writing life. Essays on place, memory, and the practice of paying attention. Short fiction published in literary magazines and journals.
All Writing Short Fiction November 2023
The Woman Who Kept All Her Windows Clean
A story about a retired schoolteacher, a view of the Firth of Forth, and the particular loneliness of being seen.
Published in The White Review
Essay June 2023
Edinburgh in November: Notes on Atmosphere as Subject
What the city offers when it turns its face away. A meditation on weather, light, and the places that write us back.
Published in The Paris Review
Short Fiction February 2022
Forty Seconds at the Corner of Leith Walk
The story of a near-collision and the life that flashes through a stranger's face.
Published in Ploughshares
The Author
She writes in the early hours,
before the city remembers itself.
ZENA is the author of seven novels published by Captivate Publishing. Her work has been translated into multiple languages and read across the world.
She lives and works in London, where she is currently at work on her eighth novel.
Read the full story
7
Novels Published
11
Languages
Booker
Prize Longlist
8th
Novel in Progress
Critical Reception
“A writer of rare precision and even rarer mercy. The Meridian Hours is a masterwork of restraint.”
The Guardian
“She has an extraordinary ear for the sentence that arrives exactly when you have stopped expecting it.”
The New York Times Book Review
“Every few years a novel arrives that makes all other fiction feel slightly less necessary. This is that novel.”
The London Review of Books