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
London · Fiction & Non-Fiction
Stories that
unfold long after the last page turns.
Seven books, including the Dream Keepers trilogy. Writing that takes its time. The eighth is being written now.
Fiction Series · Book One
The Dream Keepers
ZENA
Mona has a gift — the ability to enter dreams and reshape them from the inside. When she discovers an underground world of lucid dreamers using astral travel to infiltrate an extraordinary theme park, she must choose between the waking world and everything she thought she wanted. A page-turning debut of imagination, mystery, and wonder.
"A world where dreams and reality collide — and nothing is quite what it seems." — The Dream Keepers
Book One of the Dream Keepers Trilogy · eBook
The Work
Three books,
written in dreams.
Book One
The Dream Keepers
Mona discovers a world of lucid dreamers and astral travel — and must choose who she really is.
Read more →
Book Two
The Dream Keepers – Awake
Mona ventures into forbidden realms where dreams and reality begin to merge in dangerous ways.
Read more →
Book Three
The Dream Keepers – Architects of Duality
The trilogy concludes as Mona faces the constructs of the mind and tests of loyalty she never expected.
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