Nina Mingya Powles

'Remarkable' - Robert Macfarlane 'Gorgeous' - Amy Liptrot 'Urgent and nourishing' - Jessica J. Lee Nina 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. Throughout her life, there have been others that have meant different things, but have still...

"I lay strips of pale peach cotton 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 skilfully threads together themes of belonging and material inheritance against a backdrop of verse, collage and textile....

Home is many people and places and languages, some separated by oceans. Where is the place your body is anchored? Which body of water is yours? Is it that I've anchored myself in too many places at once, or nowhere at all? The answer lies somewhere between. Nina Mingya Powles first learned to swim in Borneo — where her mother...