Dan Zell writes playful, poignant fiction about identity – the version we perform, the version we hide, and the distance between them. His influences include Nora Ephron, Nick Hornby, David Nicholls and William Boyd.

His debut novel, Resolutions, begins on New Year’s Eve 2025, when Nadia throws a fancy-dress dinner party for her single friends. Guests arrive as ‘proverbial beasts’ – an Elephant in the Room, a Fish Out of Water, a Red Herring – and before midnight each writes down a resolution for the year ahead. It’s meant to be a joke. Only it isn’t, quite. Told across twelve months and four first-person voices, with detours into group chats, dating apps and AI-powered questionnaires, it follows a misfiring love story, a divorce turned self-optimisation project, two cousins wrestling with cultural identity, and a hopeless romantic shouting into the digital void. Each discovers the same quiet truth: in a world obsessed with self-improvement, the things that really matter refuse to be managed.

At Cove Park in October, Dan is finishing the final draft of Resolutions. Back home in London, he’s also an entrepreneur who designs socks, table tennis bats and balls, among other things.