Draft:Zena Agha

Zena Agha is a British writer, poet, scholar, and filmmaker.

Early life and education
Agha is from London and of Palestinian and Iraqi descent. Her Palestinian paternal family had fled to Damascus after the Naksa, after which her father taught in Algeria and then moved to London in the 1970s. At 16, Agha was elected deputy member of the Youth Parliament for her Borough and at 17, she became the youngest member of Operation Black Vote's MP shadowing scheme for Fiona MacTaggart.

Agha studied History and Politics at the University of Warwick, where she she founded the poetry collective Shoot from the Lip. She also studied abroad for a year at Sciences Po in Paris on the Erasmus programme. Upon graduating from Warwick in 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in History and Politics, Agha won a Kennedy Scholarship to pursue a Master of Arts (MA) in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. She is currently undertaking a Geography PhD at Newcastle University with a focus on colonial cartography in Palestine.

Career
From 2017 to 2019, Agha served as a US policy fellow for Al-Shabaka: the Palestinian policy network. She has contributed to publications such as The Independent, +972 Magazine, The Nation, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, Progressive International, and Skin Deep, and appeared on networks such as BBC News.

Agha co-directed the short documentary The Place That is Ours (2021) with Dorothy Allen-Pickard, which was released on Nowness and screened at a number of festivals, including the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.

In 2022, Agha published her debut poetry collection Objects from April and May via Hajar Press. The book was a finalist for the Alice James Book Award, the Omnidawn Book Prize, and the Philip Levine Poetry Prize.

Personal life
Agha's Syrian-born paternal cousin Ajmad died in 2014 attempting to cross the Mediterranean while fleeing the Syrian Civil War.

Books

 * Objects from April and May (2022)

Select essays

 * "Elegy for Return" in Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence (2023)