In his early writing, Zinik was influenced by his older friends and mentors, Alexander Asarkan (1930-2004), a mail-artist and theatre critic; and Pavel Ulitin (1918–1986), who used cut-ups technique in his avant-garde prose.

The ambiguities of émigré existence, cultural dislocation, estrangement and the evasive nature of memory have become not only the main topic of Zinik's prose, which includes novels, short stories, essays, lectures and radio broadcasts, but also his ‘literary device’.

[2] Zinik's eighteen books of prose published since his departure from Russia dwell on the dual existence of bilingual immigrants, religious converts, political exiles and outcasts – from habitués of Soho (Mind the Door, 2001) to the sect of Jewish Muslims in Istanbul (Yarmulkes under the Turbans, 2018).

Zinik's dramatic narrative My Father’s Leg was commissioned and broadcast by BBC Radio 3 in 2005 and subsequently published as a novel in Russian in Ural magazine.

An experimental novel The Orgone Box (2017), full of allusions to the life of the Marxist Freudian thinker Wilhelm Reich is written in an Anglicised Russian.

The nonfiction A Yarmulke under the Turban (2018) is about Zinik's travels around Turkey retracing the steps of the self-proclaimed Jewish Messiah Shabtai Zvi who converted to Islam in 1666.