8:15 Grant Morris in New Orleans
8:35 John Huckerby: wave and tidal energy
9:05 Bernard Spolsky: saving languages
9:40 Robert Catto: Rupert Julian
10:05 Playing Symphonies with Peter Walls
11:05 Julian Rayner: stopping malaria
11:40 Nick Carman: skiing the Silk Road
Producer: Mark Cubey
Wellington engineer: Chris Adams
8:15 Grant Morris
New Zealand writer Grant Morris is based in New Orleans, where he hosts the Happy Hour webcast, and produces the business show, Out to Lunch.
8:35 John Huckerby
John Huckerby is the founder and executive officer of Awatea, which advocates, assists and accelerates the development of the marine energy industry in New Zealand. He is also the director of energy industry consultancy Power Projects Limited, and current chair of the international collaborative body Ocean Energy Systems.
9:05 Bernard Spolsky
Professor Bernard Spolsky is a world-renowned linguist whose work over the last 40 years includes research on language policy, sociolinguistics, educational linguistics, language testing and its history, and language attitudes and identity. He was keynote speaker at a symposium at Victoria University of Wellington focusing on the survival of Māori and Pasifika languages.
9:40 Robert Catto
Robert Catto is a Wellington photographer of Canadian origin who specialises in performing arts, live event and location photography. He will be talking about Rupert Julian, New Zealand’s least-known world-famous Hollywood star.
10:05 Playing Symphonies with Peter Walls
Peter Walls has been chief executive of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra for nearly a decade, and retires on Christmas Eve. He will conduct the NZSO in two free musical workshops on how to listen to a symphony, Close Encounters: The Classical Symphony (14 December) and Close Encounters: The Romantic Era (15 December), both at the Wellington Town Hall.
11:05 Julian Rayner
Dr Julian Rayner is a New Zealand molecular biologist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK. Since 2008, he has been working on the Sanger Institute Malaria Programme, where he leads a group that recently published research in the Lancet on the prospect of developing a vaccine against malaria, a disease that costs the lives of 800,000 people every year.
11:40 Nick Carman
Nick Carman is a structural engineer. With nine other Kiwis, he is about to leave New Zealand for Beijing to begin a ski trip that will follow the Silk Road, the old interconnected trade route across Asia, the Middle East and Europe, finishing in Venice in April 2012.
Saturday Morning repeats:
On Saturday 3 December 2011 during Great Encounters between 6:06pm and 7:00pm on Radio New Zealand National, you can hear a repeat broadcast of Kim Hill’s interview from 26 November with Gerard Smyth, about his new documentary When a City Falls.
Preview: Saturday 10 December
Kim Hill’s guests will include Delaney Davidson and Oren Gershtein.