
The Emma Press launches food memoir by Nina Mingya Powles
The Emma Press is publishing Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai, a food memoir by award-winning poet Nina Mingya Powles, at the end of the month.
Tiny Moons is a collection of essays about food and belonging. Powles journeys between Wellington, Kota Kinabalu and Shanghai, tracing the constants in her life: eating and cooking, and the dishes that have come to define her. Through childhood snacks, family feasts, Shanghai street food and student dinners, she attempts to find a way back towards her Chinese-Malaysian heritage.
Tiny Moons is the fourth in the Emma Press Prose Pamphlets series, which started with Jan Carson’s Postcard Stories in 2017. It was selected for publication from the publisher’s call for manuscripts in 2017.

Publisher Emma Dai’an Wright said: “Tiny Moons is a nuanced exploration of the many complexities of being a person of mixed heritage, which I relate to on a personal level. I also love food- and travel-writing, so this book was the perfect fit for The Emma Press.”
Powles, who now lives in London, is a poet and zinemaker of mixed Malaysian-Chinese heritage, born in Aotearoa New Zealand. She was co-winner of the 2018 Women Poets’ Prize and won the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing in 2019. Her next poetry collection, Magnolia, 木蘭, will be published by Nine Arches Press later this year.
The launch of Tiny Moons will take place at the Second Shelf Bookshop on Thursday 27th February at 19:00.
Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai
ISBN 978-1-912915-34-7
96 pages / 198 × 129 × 5 mm / 27 February 2020 / £8.99
About the author:

Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and zinemaker of mixed Malaysian-Chinese heritage, born in Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of poetry collections field notes on a downpour (If a Leaf Falls, 2018) and Luminescent (Seraph Press, 2017). She was co-winner of the 2018 Women Poets’ Prize and in 2019 won the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. She is poetry co-editor of The Shanghai Literary Review and the founding editor of Bitter Melon 苦瓜. Her next poetry collection, Magnolia, 木蘭, will be published by Nine Arches Press in 2020. She is currently working on a book of lyric essays. She lives in London.
About The Emma Press:

The Emma Press is an award-winning independent publishing house based in the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham. It was founded in 2012 by Emma Dai’an Wright and is dedicated to producing beautiful, thought-provoking books for adults and children, and to making poetry accessible to everyone. The Emma Press publishes themed anthologies, illustrated chapbooks and children’s poetry and fiction, with a growing list of translations which includes titles from Latvia, Estonia, Indonesia, Spain and the Netherlands.
The Emma Press recently received funding from Arts Council England‘s Elevate programme, developed to enhance the diversity of the arts and cultural sector by strengthening the resilience of diverse-led organisations.