Nina Mingya Powles is of Pākehā and Malaysian-Chinese heritage and was born in Wellington. She is the author of field notes on a downpour (2018), Luminescent (2017) and Girls of the Drift (2014). In 2018 she was one of three winners of the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize.  She is poetry editor of The Shanghai Literary Review and founding editor of Bitter Melon苦瓜, a new poetry press. Her prose debut, a food memoir, will be published by The Emma Press in 2019.