Shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2021

"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.

Nominated for 'Best First Collection' by Forward PrizesPoetry Book Society Recommendation

Magnolia, Nina Mingya Powles’ first full collection, dwells within the tender, shifting borderland between languages, and between poetic forms, to examine the shape and texture of memories, of myths, and of a mixed-race girlhood. Abundant with multiplicities, these poems find profound, distinctive joy in sensory nourishment – in the sharing of food, in the recounting of memoirs, or vividly within nature. This is a poetry deeply attuned to the possibilities within layers of written, spoken and inherited words. A journal of sound, colour, rain and light.