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 the Millay Colony for the Arts. Zena’s short film, ‘The Place that is Ours‘, co-directed with Dorothy Allen-Pickard, premiered on Nowness in November 2021 and was selected for the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival in 2022 among several other international festivals. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The Independent, Foreign Affairs, The Margins, NPR and El País.

Zena previously served as the US Policy Fellow for Al-Shabaka: the Palestinian Policy Network, where her areas of expertise include Israeli spatial practices, climate change and Palestinian adaptive capabilities. She  was awarded the Kennedy Scholarship to undertake a Masters in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, and is currently an ESRC-funded doctoral candidate at Newcastle University exploring colonial cartography in Palestine.