Zahra

Biography

Zahra has been writing since she was nine years old, when poetry became the first language that made sense to her. It still is.

She is a writer whose work moves between fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, not because she could not choose, but because different things require different forms. Her novels live in the territory of love, identity, and the quiet damage people do to each other. Her poetry explains itself. Her non-fiction came from the kind of understanding that does not come from a clinical practice or a library, the kind you accumulate whether you want to or not, and eventually decide to do something with.

She spent years thinking like an investigative journalist before she became a novelist, which means she came to storytelling already knowing how to find what is true, how to cut what is not, and how to write something that holds up under pressure. The fiction was always there waiting. She just took the long way around to it.