Authors

Jenny Powell is a Dunedin writer who has published seven individual and two collaborative collections of poems, the most recent, South D Poet Lorikeet in 2017. In 2016 she wrote The Case of the Missing Body; a non-fiction account of a woman who has no sense of her body (OUP). Her two collaborative theatre pieces had successful debut seasons, and she has since been commissioned to write a piece with Anthony Richie for young people’s choir and orchestra. In 2020 she was an RAK Mason Writing Fellow and performed poems at the 2020 Festival of Reading ‘Yarns in Barns’, Wairarapa, and was part of the inaugural performance ‘Southern Writers’ at Te Awe Library, Wellington. Also in 2020 she was a support poet for Poet Laureate David Eggleton at his inauguration at Matahiwe Marae. Powell was nominated by Takahē Literary Magazine for the international  2020 ‘Best of the Net’ anthology.

SARAH POWELL was six weeks old when she was tucked away under the desk in her mother's medical practice. It's no wonder that at the age of fourteen she figured she'd go to medical school. She relegated to a child's hobby all the fanfictions she'd written in the wee hours of the morning and the grand ideas for a five-book YA series which had been created with friends around the lunch table. Adult life as Dr Powell awaited. But halfway through her third year of medical school, she realised she had made a mistake. She had to leave medical school. Her heart was in her writing and she had a book to finish. Three hard years, six drafts, and far more loneliness than she could have imagined later, it's finally done. She hopes that as people read it, she will have more opportunities for conversations that might inspire other books, a la those lunch table days. In the meantime she'll be hanging around Wellington, cooking French food, running on a treadmill, and dreaming of travel.

Keryn Powell lives in Napier, New Zealand with her family. Interests include reading, playing and listening to music, gardening and any activity that avoids housework. When not writing, she works as a GP.

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Nina Mingya Powles is a poet, zinemaker and non-fiction writer of Malaysian-Chinese and Pākehā heritage, currently living in London. She is the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020), poetry box-set Luminescent (Seraph Press, 2017), and several poetry chapbooks and zines, including Girls of the Drift (Seraph Press, 2014). In 2018 she was one of three winners of the inaugural Women Poets' Prize, and in 2019 won the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. Magnolia 木蘭 was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Nina has an MA in creative writing from Victoria University of Wellington and won the 2015 Biggs Family Prize for Poetry. She is the founding editor of Bitter Melon 苦瓜, a risograph press that publishes limited-edition poetry pamphlets by Asian writers. Her collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water, is forthcoming from Canongate Books in 2021.

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Penelope Pratley is an illustrator and author with a passion for creating books that inspire children to find their place in the world. With Bachelors of Fine Art and of Teaching, she has taught art from preschool to high school. She now works from her home studio and tutors aspiring artists.

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S.J. Pratt loves writing young adult science fiction. Her work has appeared in Sponge, The Quick Brown Dog, The Commuting Book, and Antipodean SF. She is also a narrator for the Antipodean SF Radio Show, which she loves. She runs an aerospace engineering company by day and writes by night (well, early hours of the morning), is an avid feminist and coffee addict, and looks forward to culminating her existence as an omnipotent space whale. She lives in Christchurch, New Zealand with her incredible husband and incredibly needy cat.

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