Agent Zo : Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction 2025

'Deeply researched and written with verve... thoughtful as well as action packed' The Times

'Gripping, moving and important' Simon Sebag Montefiore

'Agent Zo is a triumph. Absolutely essential reading' Hallie Rubenhold

This is the incredible story of Elzbieta Zawacka, the WW2 resistance fighter known as 'Zo'. The only woman to reach London from Warsaw during the Second World War as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command, Zo undertook two missions in the capital before secret SOE training in the British countryside. As the only female member of the Polish elite Special Forces - the SOE-affiliated 'Silent Unseen' - Zo became the only woman to parachute from Britain to Nazi German-occupied Poland. There, whilst being hunted by the Gestapo who arrested her entire family, she took a leading role in the Warsaw Uprising and the liberation of Poland.

After the war she was demobbed as one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Yet the Soviet-backed post-war Communist regime not only imprisoned her, but also ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden for over forty years. Now, through new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside Zo, Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to life, and also transforms how we see the history of women's agency in the Second World War.

''Deeply researched and written with verve... thoughtful as well as action packed'' The Times

''Gripping, moving and important'' Simon Sebag Montefiore

''Agent Zo is a triumph. Absolutely essential reading'' Hallie Rubenhold

This is the incredible story of Elzbieta Zawacka, the WW2 resistance fighter known as ''Zo''. The only woman to reach London from Warsaw during the Second World War as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command, Zo undertook two missions in the capital before secret SOE training in the British countryside. As the only female member of the Polish elite Special Forces - the SOE-affiliated ''Silent Unseen'' - Zo became the only woman to parachute from Britain to Nazi German-occupied Poland. There, whilst being hunted by the Gestapo who arrested her entire family, she took a leading role in the Warsaw Uprising and the liberation of Poland.

After the war she was demobbed as one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Yet the Soviet-backed post-war Communist regime not only imprisoned her, but also ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden for over forty years. Now, through new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside Zo, Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to life, and also transforms how we see the history of women''s agency in the Second World War.