Nina Mingya Powles – författare

A spellbinding, dreamy and irresistibly romantic magical-realist story set in Shanghai, where a shimmering school swimming pool hides a gateway to a flooded mirror world – perfect for fans of Studio Ghibli, Water Moon and Our Infinite Fates When fifteen-year-old Leah relocates to Shanghai with her parents, she dreads the thought of starting over somewhere new. But Jade River International School is unlike any other. Perched where the city meets the sea, strange secrets hide behind its immaculate facade: a room full of cloudlike orchids, vanishing cats and a swimming pool that shimmers with a dazzling blue light.Leah soon makes friends in the charismatic Viv and Sam, and finds herself increasingly drawn to Hunter, who might even feel the same way about her. But one night, Leah discovers that the swimming pool is a gateway to another world – a flooded world where waves crash into a ruined Jade River, now covered in twisted vines and iridescent shells. As the summer dance nears, Leah and her friends must piece together the dark truth at the heart of Jade River, before it pulls them under.

"I lay strips of pale peachcotton and cloud-printed cloth side by side.Each becomes a strange,asymmetric quilt block.Each block like a sentence,each sentence an island, all the islands loosely touching."In her second book of poetry, Nina Mingya Powles skilfullythreads together themes of belonging and material inheritance against abackdrop of verse, collage and textile. From shorelines in Aotearoa, the UK andacross Asia, this collection moves through words and images to explore waterand the body, sewing and artmaking, personal histories and multiculturalidentities. In the Hollow of the Wave questions the possibilities ofwhat a poem can be.

'Remarkable' Robert Macfarlane'Gorgeous' Amy Liptrot'Urgent and nourishing' Jessica J. LeeNina Mingya Powles first learned to swim in Borneo - where her mother was born and her grandfather studied freshwater fish. There, the local swimming pool became her first body of water. Through her life there have been others that have meant different things, but have still been, in their own way, home: from the wild coastline of New Zealand to a pond in northwest London.In lyrical, powerful prose, Small Bodies of Water weaves together memories, dreams and nature writing. Exploring everything from migration, food, family, earthquakes and the ancient lunisolar calendar, Nina reflects on a girlhood spent growing up between two cultures, and what it means to belong.

"why don’t you write about yourself ever people used to ask / and I didn’t know why / either in Chinese one word can lead you out of the dark / then back into it / in a single breath" Magnolia is the debut poetry collection by poet, essayist and non-fiction writer Nina Mingya Powles, one of contemporary poetry's most exciting new international voices and the winner of the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. These vivid, luscious poems move between journal and biography, place and belonging, all the time exploring the multitudinous facets of language and culture that make up our identity, from the sense of longing that a delicious bowl of food conjures up to the inviting glow of paper lanterns that illuminate memory and travel. Formally rich, these unique poems skilfully broaden the perspective of all a poem can hold can contain through their daring, joyful and expansive approach.

Tiny Moons is a collection of essays about food and belonging. Nina Mingya Powles journeys between Wellington, Kota Kinabalu and Shanghai, tracing the constants in her life: eating and cooking, and the dishes that have come to define her. Through childhood snacks, family feasts, Shanghai street food and student dinners, she attempts to find a way back towards her Chinese-Malaysian heritage.

In the Hollow of the Wave, the second collection by Nina Mingya Powles, examines orientalism, art and artmaking in a time of ecological crisis. Influenced by the lives of women artists, and combining textile art, collage and poetry, these precise, remarkable poems reflect on the material of living, the thread of stories and memories held within fabrics and garments.Through museum and gallery spaces, Powles examines creation and craft as a radical act of love, reclamation and resistance to the shadow of colonial legacies and attitudes. Engaging with the work of artists such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Yayoi Kusama, Etel Adnan and the fashion designer Guo Pei, these poems rework the notion of ekphrasis into something elemental and tactile, to find new ways of rendering shifting places, languages and selves; a thriving tapestry of nature and life in full and vivid colour.Poetry Book of the Month, The ObserverIncluded in Best Recent Poetry Roundup, The Guardian