Nina Mingya Powles is a writer, editor and publisher from Aotearoa
New Zealand. She is the author of the poetry collections field
notes on a downpour, Luminescent and Magnolia, which was
shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She is
also the author of Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai. In
2019 she won the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing,
for Small Bodies of Water, and in 2018 she won the Women Poets'
Prize. She is the founding editor of Bitter Melon, a small press
that publishes limited-edition pamphlets by Asian poets. She was
born in Aotearoa, partly grew up in China, and now lives in
London.
@ninamingya | ninapowles.com
A remarkable book . . . Its language trembles on the brink of
poetry; these sentences have surety to their rhythms, subtlety to
their weightings. Beautifully, dreamily, intricately, it explores
movement, migration and memory. Identity, here, is experienced as
liquid, as fluent. Small Bodies of Water was the winner of the
inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize, and it's my belief that Shepherd
would have loved this book - and would have wanted to walk and swim
with Nina, talking of all that her book brings to the surface
*ROBERT MACFARLANE*
Nina Mingya Powles is a distinctive new voice: attentive and
tender. Her experience of belonging to many places is one that so
many of us can relate to. This book is a beautiful personal journey
through plants and sea creatures, food and language . . . A
gorgeous read
*AMY LIPTROT*
Elegant, understated, urgent and nourishing, this is a book that
gives shape to the many intimate waters that connect us, to
languages loved, lost and longed for, to the lands that honour us
by giving us a home. With poetic precision, Nina Mingya Powles
shows us what nature writing can be, braiding place, food, family,
migration and all their legacies. This is non-fiction at its most
dynamic, its most transporting. I will keep this book close by and
return to it often
*JESSICA J. LEE*
So cool and crystalline, but with deep currents of association
shifting like tides beneath
*MELISSA HARRISON*
Nature writing lovers will adore this collection of lyrical essays
. . . Traversing Borneo to New Zealand to North London, it explores
what bodies of water have meant to [Powles] while navigating
girlhood and growing up
* * Evening Standard, Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year * *
Small Bodies of Water gave me such a longing for travel. It is so
full of texture and taste and different kinds of light . . . Nina
Mingya Powles takes very small moments and details and skilfully
imbues them with poignancy and meaning. It feels like a renewed
form of nature writing, in which nature is not necessarily to the
fore but nonetheless ever-present; in which nature is a medium for
remembering and discovering
*SARA BAUME*
Vividly connected to nature . . . Captivating . . . Evocative
literary sketches of Powles' life are drawn thoughtfully together .
. . Mesmerising . . . Tender, like a flower pressed between the
pages of a book
* * Big Issue * *
A tender and tactile meditation on the elements that hold us
together and keep us apart, Small Bodies of Water is a luminous,
flowing book. Nina Mingya Powles's mind shimmers
*SEÁN HEWITT*
A shimmering, poetic masterpiece
* * Time Out * *
A hauntingly beautiful work - as deep and varied as the bodies of
water it explores - and just as affecting. Powles writes of the
body, the self and the natural world in ways I've not experienced
before; full of raw and glistening truth. This book is exquisite
and perfectly formed and reflective and it leaves ripples on your
insides like the sea. The writing is off the scale
*KERRI NÍ DOCHARTAIGH*
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