Saturday Morning with Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand National: 30 January 2010

Kim Hill returns to the national airwaves this Saturday with the first full-length programme of new material for 2010.
Book related guests include the following:

Philip Hoare will be a guest at New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week (8-14 March) during the New Zealand International Arts Festival 2010. He has written biographies of Noel Coward and aesthete Stephen Tennant, and histories of the military hospital at Spike Island, and Victorian utopian sects, but now he is obsessed by whales. His latest book - Leviathan or, The Whale (Fourth Estate, - won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.

Iranian-born writer Fariba Hachtroudi is the author of a number of books in French, including L’Exilée (1985) and Khomeyni Express (2009), and is currently the French writer in residence at the Randell Cottage in Wellington.

Molecular biologist Nina V. Fedoroff was appointed to the post of Science and Technology Adviser to then US Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, in 2007; a position she still holds for the current Secretary, Hillary Rodham Clinton. She is the author of the 2004 book Mendel in the Kitchen: a Scientist's View of Genetically Modified Food

In her Children’s Books slot, Kate De Goldi will discuss four books found on the children’s shelves of the Canterbury Public Library that are not widely available in shops: Marcelo in the Real World by Franciso X Stork (Arthur Levine Books/Scholastic), On the Wings of Heroes by Richard Peck (Dial Books/Penguin), The Locked Garden by Gloria Whelan (HarperCollins), and Rodzina by Karen Cushman (Clarion Books).
Kate also provides the foreword to the reissue of 1968 novel Sydney Bridge Upside Down by New Zealand writer David Ballantyne (Text Publishing).

Footnote:
The Bookman is especially interested in Sydney Bridge Upside Down as way back in the early 1980's when I was CEO/Publisher at Penguin Books my then senior editor John Barnett convinced me that this was a NZ classic that deserved to be back in print so we reissued it. The title had orginally been published by Whitcome & Tombs in 1968. Our reissue did not sell very well and it again went out of print but it was a title I always felt proud to have published.
There is a touch of irony in that it is now being reissued by impressive Melbourne-based outfit Text Publishing, (they also publish Lloyd Jones in Australia), who are represented in NZ by Penguin Books.
I hope a new generation of New Zealanders will now discover David Ballantyne's great book.

In 2004 Auckland University Press published Bryan Reid's After the Fireworks - A Life of David Ballantyne .
I imagine this title will be out of print by now but it should be available second hand or from your library should anyone wish to read more about this highly rated but comparatively little know NZ writer.