Dr Zhiyan Basharati is a finalist for the Young New Zealander of the Year Award. She came to New Zealand age 11 after spending her childhood in a Kurdish refugee camp. Now she has a PhD in forensic psychology and is a dedicated advocate for refugees and migrants. On the day of the Christchurch mosque attacks, Zhiyan was by coincidence at Christchurch Hospital. She quickly made herself known to staff and began organising translators who spoke Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Somali or Kurdish to assist victims and their family members. She went on to coordinate the welfare centre at Hagley College and set up the Christchurch Victims Organising Committee (CVOC), working around the clock to disseminate information and help survivors and their families in various capacities, including distributing donations and helping with immigration status and visa issues. The Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year Awards will take place on 31 March.

There are over 700 sites of Māori rock art in Te Wai Pounamu / the South Island – most of it in the limestone-rich areas of North Otago and South Canterbury. Archaeologist Amanda Symon is on a mission to protect these precious tuhituhi o nehera (drawings of ancient times).

Joey Hoofdman's biological father was Jan Karbaat – a Dutch fertility doctor who inseminated Joey's mother with his own sperm, without her knowledge. Karbaat, who died in 2017, is believed to have fathered possibly hundreds of children in the same way. Joey, who is now an advocate for the rights of children conceived by sperm donation, features in the new documentary Seeds of Deceit:

Her Say is a collection of stories told by New Zealand women who have lived in - and escaped - abusive relationships. Its publication is a long-held dream of Jackie Clark who, in 2013, launched The Aunties, a grassroots charity helping women to rebuild their lives after a period of trauma. She quit her job, turning her back on her comfortable life, to focus on The Aunties full-time, becoming Aunty in Charge and assisting hundreds of women with material needs and emotional support. Moeroa Marsters contributed to the book and is chairperson of The Aunties board.

British actor Juliet Stevenson narrates Blindness, a major international, socially-distanced theatre experience coming to the Auckland Writers Festival. Blindness is adapted from the novel of the same name by Nobel Laureate José Saramago and is the story of an epidemic that wipes out sight. Juliet Stevenson has a long career in film, television and stage productions and a few years ago bought a double-decker bus to provide refugee children in Calais with a safe and dry day care centre.

The yoga and "wellness" world has had several high-profile members fall under the influence of QAnon and Covid denial. This intersection between right-wing conspiracy theories and left-wing wellness utopianism has been dubbed "conspirituality". Matthew Remski joins us to explain how and why these worlds have collided. Remski is a cult researcher, and co-host of the Conspirituality Podcast who has written extensively about the pervasive cultism and abuse in yoga, spirituality and wellness culture. He is the author of Practice and All is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond.

Listener Feedback for 6 March 2021

Women activists were protesting against all forms of oppression in 1984 when Auckland university lecturer and playwright Mervyn Thompson was kidnapped, beaten and chained to a tree by six women who accused him of being a rapist. Thompson was never charged with rape, and his kidnappers have never been identified. That same year, Bidge Smith became Auckland University Students' Association Women's Rights Officer and spoke out in support of the anonymous women who carried out the attack. She appears in the documentary Six Angry Women which premieres on TVNZ 1 this Monday 8 March at 8.30pm and can then be seen on TVNZ OnDemand.

Author, political commentator and Professor of Communication Design at Massey University, Claire Robinson has now written a play about Aotearoa's first Labour Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage. The Lee Letter explores Savage's legacy and his turbulent premiership during which he avoided seeking the medical treatment that could have prevented his early death from colon cancer. Claire Robinson says underpinning his reluctance to get treatment was his fear of being challenged for the party leadership by the popular Labour MP John A. (Jack) Lee. The Lee Letter is having its first public reading at Circa Theatre, Wellington, on 13 March as part of the Fringe Festival.

Best-selling author Isabel Allende has a brand new book - The Soul of A Woman - a meditation on power, feminism and what it means to be a woman. As a child, Isabel Allende watched her mother, abandoned by her husband, provide for her three small children. As a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s, she rode the first wave of feminism. She has seen what has been accomplished by the movement in the course of her lifetime and hopes this book will light the torch for young women "to carry on the work still left to be finished".