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 appers 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.

'Zahirra Dayal’s novel draws the reader in to a story of family and childhood that alternates between love and pain in a way that reflects powerfully on what it means to be a woman, wife, mother, daughter, and sister. For those who have grown up in Zimbabwe, her prose resonates and draws you in to memories and nostalgia of your own; for those who are unfamiliar with the southern African country, it paints a poignant portrait of the ups and downs the country faced in its new postcolonial reality after 1980. Many women, even those outside the Indian community of Zimbabwe, will find a piece of themselves in this work.'- Trishula R. Patel, Ph.D., Associate Professor in History, University of Denver