Zena Agha is a Palestinian-Iraqi writer, poet and multi-disciplinary artist from London. She is the author of Objects from April and May (Hajar Press, April 2022), which was a finalist for the Alice James Book Award (2020), the Omnidawn First/Second Book Prize (2020) and the Philip Levine Poetry Prize (2020). She has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Millay Arts and is part of the White Kite Collective. Zena’s short film, ‘The Place that is Ours‘ premiered on Nowness in November 2021 and was selected for the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival among several other international festivals. Much of her work is speculative, focusing on how the past, present and future overlap.

Zena is the Interim Director of the British Palestinian Committee and sits on its Executive Committee. She previously served as Al-Shabaka’s US Policy Fellow, where her research focused on Israeli spatial practices, climate change and Palestinian adaptive capacities, and remains on the Editorial Committee. She has parliamentary and congressional experience and is a frequent commentator on Palestinian affairs. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, NPR and El País. Zena was awarded a Kennedy Scholarship to undertake a Masters in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, and completed her PhD at Newcastle University examining historical and contemporary practices of (counter) mapping in Palestine.