RNZ: Saturday Morning

Local RnB singer Ladi6 has had a big year: she’s undergone two vocal surgeries, released a critically acclaimed EP, and taken home an armful of awards. 

Australian author Jessie Cole had an idyllic childhood - in the late 1970s her parents left suburbia to live in an isolated part of northern New South Wales, where Cole and her brother Jake ran free in the rainforest. When Cole was 12 her half-sister, Zoe, took her own life and her father, a psychiatrist, suffered extreme mental illness and committed suicide six years later. Staying is Cole's memoir and a story of despair, courage and healing. Cole is the author of Darkness on the Edge of Town and Deeper Water. Her work has also appeared in many Australian publications, including Best Australian Essays, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Island Magazine, The Lifted Brow, Good Weekend, Big Issue, Daily Life and The Guardian. She still lives in the family home where she grew up.

Barry Hearn is Chairman of the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) which runs a number of competitions, including the World Darts Championship. He is considered to be the brain that turned darts from a pub game to an international sport with an audience of millions. Hearn is also the promoter behind huge boxing events and boxers including Anthony Joshua, Frank Bruno and Lennox Lewis. He's involved in promoting snooker, tenpin bowling, golf and table tennis. Hearn is the founder and chairman of Matchroom Sport which owns, manages and promotes sporting events and supplies sports programmes to broadcasters around the world, he is a regular contributor to Talksport, and the chairman of World Snooker. The Auckland Darts Masters is on August 3-5, featuring eight of the world's top PDC players, including the world number 1 - Michael Van Gerwen.

Helen Zaltzman is a British broadcaster, podcaster and writer. She started podcasting in 2007 with collaborator Olly Man, the pair producing Answer Me This! in Zaltzman's living room in her south London home. Answer Me This!, now a monthly podcast, won a slew of awards including being named as one of the world's top 10 podcasts by The Guardian. In 2015, Zaltzman struck out on her own with a linguistics podcast, called The Allusionist, which has also gone on to win plaudits. She is bringing The Allusionist stage show to the National Library on Monday, 16 July, 7:30pm - 8:30pm at Te Ahumairangi Ground Floor, National Library, cnr Molesworth & Aitken Streets, Thorndon, Wellington.

Professor Merryn Tawhai graduated from the University of Auckland with a PhD in Engineering Science in 2001. At the Auckland Bioengineering Institute she has established a research programme in applied computational physiology of the lung that helps in our understanding of pulmonary disease. She was the inaugural Maurice Paykel Postdoctoral Fellow and has been a recipient of RSNZ Marsden Fund, National Institutes of Health, Health Research Council of New Zealand, and MBIE grants. Tawhai was awarded the MacDiarmid Medal at the 2016 New Zealand Research Honours for her work in creating anatomically detailed models of the respiratory system. She will shortly be giving the second tranche of public talks about her work throughout New Zealand, hosted by Royal Society Te Aparangi.

Former Conservative Party politician Michael Portillo is now most famous for exploring England with the aid of a 19th-century tourist handbook on the BBC series Great British Railway Journeys.

Kim Hill reads emails and text messages from listeners to the Saturday Morning programme.

Clarke Gayford is a television producer and presenter, and the partner of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Raised outside of Gisborne, Gayford has always been a fishing enthusiast. He's been able to combine almost 20 years in television and radio broadcasting with his love of the ocean as host of Choice TV's fishing show Fish Of The Day, where in each episode he challenges himself to catch on line, and then spear, a fish characteristic with each area. Fish of the Day won Best Lifestyle Show at the 2016 Houston International Film Festival and was purchased by the National Geographic Channel. It now screens in over 35 countries. Gayford plays some of his favourite songs and speaks to Kim ahead of the birth of his first child with Ms Ardern, due June 17.

Sommelier and self-confessed wine geek Curtis Marsh says once a person gets the 'wine virus' there's no cure - "you've just got to keep feeding it wine". Marsh began his career in Wellington around 30 years ago and has since worked all over the world as a self-appointed ambassador for New Zealand wine. He spent years in the emerging wine market of Asia where he gained a profile as a columnist for The Standard (Hong Kong), the Asia correspondent for Thomson Reuters Lifestyle, the wine, food and travel columnist for the Asia Sentinel, and on his own blog, The Wandering Palate. Marsh has returned to Wellington where he consults to wineries and restaurants and has also turned his attention to Aotearoa's artisan wineries. He is speaking at the NZ Boutique Wine Festival this weekend, in his role as Resident Sommelier at The Wine Advocate.

Stephen Nicol has been studying krill for 40 years and wants to set the record straight about this small, misunderstood crustacean. Not just kai for whales, krill occupy a central place in the marine food chain and are critical to life - especially in the Antarctic. Krill is the third most abundant species on the planet and Nicol says it is adaptable "and full of surprises". Nicol has spent decades as an Antarctic krill research scientist and programme leader for the Australian government. He is an adjunct professor in the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania. He has received the Australian Antarctic Medal for outstanding contributions to Antarctic research and is the author of The Curious Life of Krill.

The value of the humanities (academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture) to society, democracy, identity, happiness and economic worth is being debated in most developed nations, including Aotearoa. New Zealander Helen Small is a Professor of English Literature at Pembroke College, University of Oxford and has written The Value of the Humanities, in which she takes a close look at arguments through the years to defend the humanities, and how valid these arguments remain in the 21st century. Small has been appointed the next Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University. She takes up the post in October.

The founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, Peter Beck, is one of six medalists in this year's Sir Peter Blake Leadership Awards, announced June 8. Rocket Lab successfully launched its first rocket into orbit in January, and now plans another in late June dubbed 'It's Business Time', with preparations well underway. If successful, it will be the company's first commercial launch. Beck talks to Kim about what the company is planning for its second major foray into space.

An end of sorts is promised for the Golden Bay grandstand in Takaka on Monday June 11, when the Tasman District Council will send in its contractors to remove the historic building to make way for a recreation centre development. But it is expected that police will also be attendance, with orders to remove groups of protesters who have fought for over two years to preserve the building in its current site. Die-hard supporters of retaining the grandstand are on-site continuously this weekend, and Kim will speak to one of them, local woman Jill Pearson.

Angie Meiklejohn moved to Auckland's Centrepoint community when she was 15. She tells Kim Hill that participating in the upcoming documentary Angie has lifted her shame about what happened there.

Kim Hill reads emails and text messages from listeners to the Saturday Morning programme.