Karyn Hay

As longtime presenter of alternative music show Radio With Pictures, Karyn Hay won fame for daring to speak in her own accent. Since leaving the show in the late 80s, Hay has worked on both sides of the microphone, directing music videos, managing radio station Kiwi FM and writing award-winning novel Emerald Budgies. 

Those unreconstructed Kiwi vowels were, depending on your point of view, the end of civilization as we knew it or a breath of indigenous fresh air. Listener writer Diana Wichtel, on Karyn Hay