Standing Room Only

Kia Mau Festival

Wellington is playing host to one of the city's most important arts events this year - the contemporary indigenous arts festival Kia Mau. It's grown from its enthusiastic but smaller-scale beginnings eight years ago to an extraordinary collection of indigenous talent from all round the Pacific Rim. Aotearoa New Zealand, of course, but also Samoa, Tonga, Malaysia, Cambodia, Canada - even Africa. Simon Morris is joined by the founders of the Kia Mau Festival - two of this country's most distinguished and talented creatives - playwright Hone Kouka, and poet, producer and film-maker Miria George.

Joe Bennett

Joe Bennett's weekly column is a delight. In a media world dominated by opinion pieces, influencers, pompous "reckons' and trivial drivel, Joe seems happy to provide short , funny - often thoughtful - pieces to lighten our day. Or at least he did. Like so many South Island luminaries at the moment, he's succumbed to the urge to write a memoir. It's called From There to Here - a journey both figurative and literal, with a subplot he describes as "a long and fruitless struggle against teaching for a living". Joe Bennett looks back with Simon Morris.

Dark Radio: NZFringe Show 2023

Simon Morris talks to Martyn Roberts from Afterburner about the upcoming interactive theatre production Dark Radio for NZ Fringe Festival 2023

Frances Edmond and her mother, poet Lauris

Even a three-volume autobiography doesn't come close to telling the full story of poet Lauris Edmond OBE. So her daughter and literary executor, Frances Edmond, is filling in the gaps in a biography called Always Going Home. This includes assessing in depth the death of another of Lauris's daughters, Rachel, left emotionally damaged by a childhood assault, and its impact on the whanau. Lauris didn't publish her first poetry collection until she was 51. Ten more followed, plus the autobiography, a novel, dramas written for radio and theatre and her work as an editor. She was 75 when she died in 2000. Frances published Night Burns with a White Fire: The Essential Lauris Edmond with co-editor Sue Fitchett in 2017 - but, as she tells Lynn Freeman, Always Going Home is very much the personal story of a mother and daughter, both writers with strong personalities. Frances Edmond's Always Going Home is published by Otago University Press.

Lynn Freeman reminisces with her friend Catriona MacLeod

In the final episode of Standing Room Only, host Lynn Freeman chats to Catriona MacLeod about her five decades at RNZ.