Zahirra Dayal was born in Zimbabwe, has lived in four different countries and now calls London home, where she works as an academic skills lecturer. Her short stories have been published in literary magazines including The Mechanics Institute Review; her poetry appears in Tesserae: a mosaic of poetry by Zimbabwean women and Remembrance: an anthology of South Asian poetry compiled by Third Space.
Her work explores unbelonging, marginalisation and racial dynamics and she is interested in confronting silences and concerned with never looking away. The Whispering Jacarandas won The Jericho Writers Friday Night Live, was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Award, the Mslexia Prize and The SI Leeds Literary Prize. It was shortlisted for the Owned Voices Award.