Zeba Books invites original essays on urban life and experience for its upcoming anthology.

Cities are odd things.

You can live in one for 20 years and still find a street you never knew existed. You can leave it behind, and somehow bring it everywhere. A train station might become a childhood memory. A neighbourhood shows more about a community than a textbook ever could. Demolish a structure, and you can recognise that cities have memories too.

And the city is also more than just a setting of the drama at times.

It’s the story.

Writers have been turning places into people for centuries, from Troy in The Iliad to Gotham, Macondo and Nite City. We know them, we envision them, we romanticise them, we fear them. Some cities are on the maps. Others exist solely in books, movies, images, music, and, at times, memories.

Your City, Your Story.

Maybe you wish to write about the city you grew up in but no longer recognize.

Perhaps the gleaming new café in your community tells you something about how the area has evolved. Perhaps the train station you walk by every day has a narrative of migration, class, or exit.

Maybe you’ve observed that some places get to be romantic, while others are nearly always talked about in a sombre tone. Or you may want to understand why certain places feel like home and others never quite do.

So what does your city have to say? Or rather, what do you have to say about your city?

Open Call for Essays

Zeba Books invites essays for its upcoming 2027 anthology — Cartographies of Concrete: Essays on Urban Life and Literature — which investigate the city as more than a background.

The city you write about does not need to be famous. In fact, we’d actually love to read about the ones that aren’t, and that includes the little city, the industrial city, and the suburb that everyone drives through, or the neighbourhood that has recently been gobbled up by development.

This is not a call for travel writing, city guides or standard academic writing. We are looking for a thought worth following. Your essay may begin in a city and end in an unexpected place. It may begin in a perfectly mundane place and force us to perceive a city differently. It may be personal, literary, cultural, historical, political, or just plain fascinating.

Submission Guidelines

• Max Word Count: ~3000 words for the essay + ~200 words for the bio.
• Format: Single .docx or .odt file.
• Submission Deadline: 27 November, 2026.

How to Submit?

We utilize Google Forms to make submissions as easy as possible. Whilst filling the form, please have your .docx file and a brief 2-sentence “Statement of Intent” ready.

Click Here to Access the Submissions Form.

Note that there is no fee for submission; furthermore, simultaneous submissions are not accepted.

Additional Info

For further queries, please write to letters@zebabooks.org