Nina Mingya Powles

Nina Mingya Powles (born 1993) is a New Zealand poet and essayist. Born in Wellington, Powles has spent time living in Shanghai and London. Her poetry and essays are inspired by nature and her Chinese-Malaysian heritage, and she has received a number of notable awards including the inaugural Women Poets' Prize in 2018.

Early life and education Powles was born in Wellington in 1993. She is half Chinese-Malaysian, a granddaughter of ichthyologist Chin Phui Kong, and has said that she aims to address the poetry canon's bias towards white European men in her writing. She holds a master's degree in creative writing with distinction from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington (2015). Magnolia was shortlisted for the 2021 Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and for the 2020 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.

Powles relocated to London in 2018. The judges commented that her work was of "incredible originality". In 2019, she was the joint winner of the Landfall Essay Competition. and the Sydney Review of Books amongst other publications. An earlier version of the work received the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing in 2019.

In November 2024 she published the poetry pamphlet this too is a glistening (co-authored with Jessica J. Lee, Alycia Pirmohamed and Pratyusha).

In the Hollow of the Wave Powles' 2025 poetry collection In the Hollow of the Wave was described by The Observer as offering a "striking vision of our beautiful, fragile world". The title of the collection comes from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. A review in The Landfall Taureka Review said the collection "exudes a type of artisanal, deep-guild, slow time of care and attentiveness".

Selected works Girls of the Drift (poetry chapbook, Seraph Press)