Nina Mingya Powles is a writer and zinemaker from Aotearoa New Zealand. In this wide-ranging reflection on writing her memoir and travel diary Tiny Moons, she discusses trying (and failing) to become more Chinese in Shanghai, the language of the body, and the politics of the untranslated.

'I want to intentionally decentre English as the main language and decentre Western ideas about Asia and Asian languages ...'

In 2018, Nina was one of three winners of the Women Poets' Prize, and in 2019 she won the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing and the Landfall Essay Competition. She is also the founding editor of Bitter Melon苦瓜, a very small press that publishes limited-edition pamphlets by Asian poets. 

Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai is published by Birmingham(UK)-based publisher the Emma Press. Nina's latest book is Small Bodies of Water.

Craft is brought to you by Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary writing. Check out our website (www.wasafiri.org) for outtakes from this interview that didn't (quite) make the final cut, and much more from writers all over the world.

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