Guest information for Saturday 5 July 2008

8:12 Alex Gibney

Oscar, Emmy and Grammy winning documentary maker Alex Gibney is the founder of Jigsaw Productions. His work as a writer/director includes the 2006 Oscar-nominated film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, the 2008 Oscar-winning film Taxi to the Dark Side, and Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. He is also the executive producer of No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent Into Chaos. The latter three films will screen during the 2008 New Zealand International Film Festivals from July.

8:35 Jilly Evans

Dr Jilly Evans began conducting biochemistry research more than 30 years ago, and obtained a first class honors Masters degree in cell biology from Auckland University. She received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, working with Nobel Prize winner Michael Smith. Jilly started her post-doctoral career at McGill University and then served in various biochemistry research positions at Merck Frosst and Merck & Company, most recently serving as director of cardiovascular diseases. A founding member and lead biologist of Amira Pharmaceuticals in San Diego, she is in Dunedin as a keynote speaker at the New Zealand International Science Festival, from 5 to12 July.

9:05 Jill Bolte Taylor

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist affiliated with the Indiana University School of Medicine, and travels the United States as the Singin' Scientist for the Harvard Brain Bank. In late 1996, she woke up to discover that she was experiencing a rare form of stroke, and three weeks later she underwent major brain surgery. For the past ten years, Dr. Taylor has been successfully rebuilding her brain; a process she describes in My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (Hodder & Stoughton (ISBN: 978-0-340-98049-1).

9:45 Kate's Klassic

Kate Camp will discuss the 1897 novel Dracula by Irish author Bram Stoker (Penguin Classics, ISBN: 978-0-14-143984-6), which served to popularise the idea of the vampire.

10:05 James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke has worked as an oil landman, pipeliner, land surveyor, newspaper reporter, college English professor, skid row social worker, clerk for the Louisiana Employment Service, and instructor in the U. S. Job Corps. His novel The Lost Get-Back Boogie was rejected 111 times over a period of nine years, and upon publication by Louisiana State University Press was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He has had over 20 further books published; the latest in the series featuring detective Dave Robicheaux is The Tin Roof Blowdown (Phoenix, ISBN: 9780753823163), set in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

10:35 Fiona Hall

Australian artist Fiona Hall is known for her boundless imagination and profound fascination with nature. Her exhibition, Force Field, explores the magic of a world in peril. It opens at City Gallery in Wellington on 12 July (to 19 October) and Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu on 4 December (to 1 March 2009).

11:05 Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon

Alisa Smith is a freelance journalist; J.B. Mackinnon is a former editor at Adbusters magazine, and the author of Dead Man in Paradise: Unraveling a Murder from a Time of Revolution (The New Press; ISBN: 978-1-59558-181-5), which won Canada's highest award for literary nonfiction. Together they launched an experiment to only consume food that came from within a 100-mile radius of their Vancouver apartment. They tell that story in The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating (Text Publishing; ISBN 9781921351730).

11:40 Julia Marshall

Julia Marshall is the founder of Gecko Press, which publishes award-winning children's books from around the world, translated into English. Their first book from this country, Snake and Lizard by Joy Cowley, illustrated by Gavin Bishop (ISBN: 978-0-9582787-3-7), won the 2008 New Zealand Post Children's Book of the Year. Recent Gecko releases include: Duck, Death and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch (ISBN: 978-1-877467-14-1), Who's Hiding? by Satoru Onishi (ISBN: 978-1-877467-13-4); Odd Bird Out by Helga Bansch (ISBN: 978-1-877467-09-7); Max's Bath (ISBN: 978-1-877467-04-2) and Max's Wagon (ISBN: 978-1-877467-03-5) by writer Barbro Lindgren and illustrator Eva Eriksson; My Friend Percy and Buffalo Bill by Ulf Stark (ISBN: 978-0-9582787-1-3); and My Village: Rhymes From Around the World, collected by Danielle Wright and illustrated by Mique Moriuchi (ISBN: 978-1-877467-11-0). Julia Marshall is also the head of the Oceania branch of the Global Association for Distracted People.

Music played on the programme

Sigur Ros: Gobbledigook
From the 2008 album: Med sud ieyrum vio spilum endalaust (With a buzz in our ears we play endlessly)
(Sigur Ros/EMI)
Played at around 11:30am

Studio operators

Wellington engineer: Lianne Smith
Dunedin engineer: Martin Balch
Pre-record engineers: David Knowles, John Roberts, Anna Veale