Zara Chen (b. 1986) is a Canadian journalist and biographer raised in Vancouver by Shanghai-born parents. A former music editor at The Walrus and contributor to The Wire, the Guardian, and the South China Morning Post, she has spent fifteen years tracing underground cultures from Montreal lofts to Guangzhou warehouses and factory towns. Her long-form features have earned two National Magazine Awards in Canada and a Digital Publishing Award for cultural reporting. She studied sociology at the University of British Columbia and ethnomusicology at McGill, and splits her time between Montreal and Taipei—still carrying a MiniDisc recorder in her bag.
Known for immersive, archive-rich reportage, Zara Chen writes across cultural history, oral tradition, and investigative nonfiction, following the lives of scenes, spaces, and objects—from experimental music and architecture to craft economies and labor. In recent years she has extended this approach to literary suspense and documentary fiction, building taut narratives from field recordings, contested memory, and the mechanics of making. She is the author of the essay collection Hum of the Spillways, the oral history Nine Ways of Listening to a City, and the narrative nonfiction works Dark House and Porcelain Revolts, which braid biography, place-making, and the ethics of work into human-scale stories.
