Making Matters: Nina Mingya Powles & Stephanie Sy-Quia
Wasafiri will be hosting a special event on the subject of craft at Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Meet two creatives whose artistic practice incorporates writing and artmaking — from glass poetry and zine making to sewing and linocut printing. Nina Mingya Powles and Stephanie Sy-Quia join Wasafiri's editor, Sana Goyal, to discuss creativity, repair, and how they draw on their personal and cultural landscapes to make – and find – meaning with their hands and words.
When: Sunday, 17 August, 3.15-4.15pm
Where: Venue NW, Edinburgh International Book Festival
Tickets: From £10.50
Sana Goyal is the Editor and Publishing Director of Wasafiri. She has an MA in Postcolonial Studies and a PhD in literary prizes from SOAS, University of London. She was formerly Deputy Editor at Wasafiri, Publicity Manager at Tilted Axis Press, and Marketing and Outreach Officer at Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. Her reviews have appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Poetry Review, Vogue India, and elsewhere. She was a judge for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize, and the 2025 International Booker Prize.
Nina Mingya Powles is a poet, writer, and zinemaker from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently based in the UK. Her debut poetry collection, Magnolia 木蘭, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was a finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In 2018 she was one of three winners of the Women Poets Prize, and in 2019 won the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize. Her resulting book of essays Small Bodies of Water was published in 2021. She has also published a short food memoir, Tiny Moons (2020).
Stephanie Sy-Quia was born in 1995 and is based in London. Her writing and criticism have been published in The Guardian, The White Review, The Boston Review, Granta, The TLS, and others. She is a Ledbury Poetry Critic and has twice been shortlisted for the FT Bodley Head Essay Prize. Her debut Amnion, published by Granta Poetry in 2021, received a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Winter Recommendation; was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio and RSL Ondaatje Prizes; and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award.