Zen Cho Books

Zen Cho was born and raised in Malaysia, moved to the UK, and worked as a lawyer while building one of the most decorated short careers in modern fantasy. Her debut novel Sorcerer to the Crown came out in 2015, was a Locus Award finalist for Best First Novel, and won her the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer in 2016. Since then she has collected a Hugo Award for her novelette If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again, the Crawford Award, and the LA Times Ray Bradbury Prize, with Locus and Astounding shortlistings besides. Very few writers of her generation have a trophy shelf like it.

Her signature move is dropping characters from the margins of society into the most gatekept institutions imaginable and letting good manners do the fighting. Sorcerer to the Crown makes Zacharias Wythe, a freed slave, England's first Black Sorcerer Royal, then pairs him with Prunella Gentleman, an orphaned young woman of mixed heritage who happens to be the most gifted magician of the age and has zero interest in being polite about it. The result reads like Georgette Heyer and Susanna Clarke had a sharper, funnier child. The sequel, The True Queen (2019), returns to the same Regency world through a Malaysian lens, and Black Water Sister (2021) shifts to modern Penang, where a closeted Harvard grad is haunted by her grandmother's ghost and dragged into temple politics and gang trouble.

She is also a superb short fiction writer. Spirits Abroad collects her stories rooted in Malaysian folklore, and her novella The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water (2020) is a wandering, wry story about bandits and a nun in a fantasy version of British Malaya. More recently she has pivoted to contemporary romance with The Friend Zone Experiment (2024) and Behind Frenemy Lines (2025), an office rivals-to-lovers story about two lawyers faking a relationship, which shows how much pure romance craft was hiding inside her fantasy all along.

On the heat front, keep expectations modest. Her fantasy sits around 1 on the book spice ratings: courtship, longing, wit, the occasional kiss with real voltage behind it, and the door firmly closed. The romances run a touch warmer but she is never graphic. The satisfaction comes from banter and slowly dropped guards, not from bedroom scenes.

Why she belongs on a romantasy site is simple: she perfected the fantasy-of-manners romance that half the genre now chases. Prunella and Zacharias are a masterclass in the slow burn, and her newer books prove she can run a proper enemies-to-lovers arc in any genre. If you loved the drawing-room scheming of Howl's Moving Castle or the banter-forward side of romantasy, Cho is the refined version of that pleasure.

The other thing that sets Cho apart is how funny she is on the page. Her comedy is dry, precise and character-driven: dragons complaining about paperwork, aunties who terrify sorcerers, magical bureaucracies that feel like real institutions with real pettiness. She uses that humor to smuggle in serious weight, because underneath the sparkle her books are consistently about colonialism, migration and who is allowed to hold power in institutions built to exclude them. Prunella's rise through Regency magical society is a delight precisely because the society deserves her disruption. It is a rare combination, books that read like champagne but linger like something stronger, and it explains why her fanbase spans romance readers, literary fantasy readers and awards juries alike.

Start with Sorcerer to the Crown if you want the Regency magic she is famous for, or Black Water Sister if you prefer contemporary settings and family ghosts. The True Queen works best read second. Save the short stories for when you already love her voice, and grab Behind Frenemy Lines when you need a fantasy break that still feels unmistakably like her.