RNZ: Saturday Morning

A selection of feedback from Saturday Morning with Kim Hill.

Kate Camp has published five collections of poetry, and a sixth collection, The internet of things, has just been released. She is the recipient of the 2016 Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, and heads off to Menton, a town on the French Riviera in southeast France in late April. She'll discuss her new poetry collection with Kim, as well as what she's expecting to do on her Katherine Mansfield Residency.

The award-winning British character actor is in NZ to promote his new film Their Finest.  

Rafeef Ziadah is a Palestinian spoken word poet and human rights activist born in Beirut, raised across several countries as a result of being one of thousands of stateless Palestinians; tertiary educated in Canada, she now lives in London. Her poems reflect both frustration and sorrow at the Palestinian struggle against occupation. The performances of her poems We Teach Life, Sir and Shades of Anger became viral sensations shortly after being released. Ziadah is in New Zealand for events in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland (7th, 8th and 9th of April), where she will perform her work backed by original music compositions by Phil Monsour, and supported by local poets and Palestinian Dabke dancers.

Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of sixteen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history. His latest work, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, suggests "only all-out thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset the existing distribution of resources", and that history has shown that peaceful policy reform alone will not cure growing inequality. He cites the end of the Roman Empire and the Cuban revolution as just two examples.

Visiting Danish academic Professor Frederik Stjernfelt was enjoying a peaceful Erskine Fellowship at the University of Canterbury until last week, when his new book hit shelves in his home country and across Europe. He's now the subject of intense media interest because of that book - Syv Myter Om Martin Luther (Seven Myths About Martin Luther), which explodes the myth, cherished by Europeans, that Luther was the father of tolerance, free speech and religious enlightenment. Stjernfelt contends Luther instead rivalled the leaders of ISIS today: he orchestrated public executions and savagely repressed ideas of tolerance and free speech, as well as authoring plans for the forcible removal of Jewish populations that matched those of Nazi Germany.

Kiwi-born adventurer and writer Sequoia di Angelo is the daughter of renowned NZ/American mountain climber Marty Schmidt and sister of 25-year-old Denali Schmidt, who died in an avalanche on K2 in 2013.

Alison Ballance is an RNZ science presenter and the author of New Zealand's Great White Sharks: How Science is Revealing Their Secrets.

Massey University professor Rouben Azizia made headlines in NZ in 1991 when he was the Soviet Union's acting ambassador. An Evening Post article featured a photo of him next to the new Russian flag replacing the Soviet hammer and sickle flag.

A selection of feedback from Saturday Morning with Kim Hill.

Professor Emeritus Roger Horrocks MNZM is an expert on the life and work of New Zealand born artist and filmmaker Len Lye. He was Lye's assistant in New York during the last year of Lye's life and wrote the acclaimed biography Len Lye. His latest project has involved writing an introduction to a newly-unearthed essay written by Len Lye and his great friend Robert Graves; an anti-Nazi screed called Individual Happiness Now. The essay will be published in association with a new exhibition at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre - On an Island - about the the pair's friendship and Lye's time on the Spanish Island of Mallorca. Roger will be speaking about Individual Happiness Now at the Govett-Brewster's Monica Brewster Evening on May 25th.

New Zealander Eleanor Bishop is a theatre director and writer based in New York. She's back home for the upcoming world premiere of her adaptation of Greg McGee's Foreskin's Lament, BOYS, as part of Auckland Theatre Company's Here & Now Festival at the ASB Waterfront Theatre. Using Foreskin's Lament as a litmus test for the state of masculinity, Eleanor Bishop and co-director Julia Croft take New Zealand's iconic locker room play and ask "what has changed since 1980?" Or more importantly, "what hasn't?" Eleanor started her career in The Playground Collective in NZ, alongside playwright Eli Kent, and in 2016 she graduated with an MFA in Directing at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Drama in Pittsburgh, PA, USA where she studied as a John Wells Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar.

Lauren Child has won many awards for her children's books, which include the extremely popular series Charlie and Lola.

Peter Lilley is a British Conservative Party politician who has been a Member of the British Parliament (MP) since 1983. He was a Cabinet minister in the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, serving as Trade and Industry Secretary from July 1990 to April 1992, and as Social Security Secretary from April 1992 to May 1997. He currently represents the constituency of Hitchin and Harpenden. A long time libertarian, he was one of the few in his party to vote consistently against Climate Change action, and latterly has been an outspoken Eurosceptic. Lilley has recently been a keynote speaker for a NZ Initiative retreat dinner, where he spoke on 'Trade after Brexit: The future of UK/NZ relations'.

Tusi Tamasese's debut feature The Orator - O Le Tulafale scored multiple honours at the 2011 Venice Film Festival. He talks about his new film One Thousand Ropes.