Zara Kassem is a writer from the UK and Pakistan. She lives in the South of England with her husband, Hassan Kassem, and their cat Peanut.

Her work has appeared in publications including Noble/Gas Qtrly, Sonder Midwest, and Visual Arts Collective’s All Roads Will Lead You Home. Zara’s poem, there is no such thing a woman, was the first prize winner of Ankita Saxena’s protest poetry challenge held by The Poetry Society. Her chapbook of the same name was published by Zoetic Press in 2018.

Zara graduated from the University of Edinburgh, where she achieved a First Class M.A. (Hons) History degree. On graduating, she began a career as a product manager of both websites and mobile apps.

In 2022, Zara created Free the Verse, a quarterly poetry magazine designed to give a diverse audience of international poets the opportunity to be published in a digital magazine without losing the gravitas of a traditional print publication.

Free the Verse now has annual readership of 100,000+ and has published poets from around the world. In 2023, we launched our first competition.