Nina Mingya Powles is a poet, essayist, zinemaker and editor from Wellington. In 2019 she won the Landfall Essay Competition and the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. Her first full-length poetry collection, Magnolia 木蘭 (Seraph Press) was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Book of Poetry and the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Nina has won the Women Poets Prize (2018), Jane Martin Prize for Poetry (2018) and the Biggs Prize for Poetry (2015). She is the author of several poetry chapbooks and zines, as well as a food memoir, Tiny Moons (The Emma Press, 2020). She is the founding editor of Bitter Melon, a small press that publishes limited-edition pamphlets by Asian poets, and is the Digital Editor of the international literary magazine Wasafiri.

Nina has participated in several festivals including in 2019 the Verb Festival (Wellington), Timber Festival (UK)  and the Wealden Literary Festival. In 2020 she was part of the Cheltenham Literary Festival, and online in the Durham Book Festival and Manchester Lit Festival.

Her debut collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water (Canongate/Allen & Unwin, 2021) explores the bodies of water that separate and connect us, as well as everything from migration, food, family, earthquakes, and the ancient lunisolar calendar to butterflies. In lyrical, powerful prose, Small Bodies of Water weaves together personal memories, dreams and nature writing. It reflects on a girlhood spent growing up between two cultures, and explores what it means to belong.

Nina’s second poetry collection, In the Hollow of the Wave (Auckland University Press, 2025), skilfully threads together themes of belonging and material inheritance against a backdrop of verse, collage and textile. From shorelines in Aotearoa, the UK and across Asia, this collection moves through words and images to explore water and the body, sewing and artmaking, personal histories and multicultural identities. In the Hollow of the Wave questions the possibilities of what a poem can be.

 

Links

Nina’s website

Auckland University Press writer page

The Guardian ‘Review Roundup’ announces the collections up for the Forward poetry prizes (July, 2020)

London Review poem of the week ‘Faraway Love’ (June, 2020)

Pantograph Punch review of Tiny Moons (April, 2020)

The Guardian announcement of the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize (Oct, 2018)