Authors

Saraid de Silva is a Sri Lankan Pakeha writer and creative based in Tamaki Makaurau. She is the co-creator and co-host of Radio New Zealand's Conversations with My Immigrant Parents, a podcast and video series in which immigrant whanau across Aotearoa have frank conversations about love, ancestry, home, food, expectation and acceptance. Saraid was a contributor to A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand, and her work has been featured in The Spinoff, Fashion Quarterly, Pantograph Punch and Tupuranga Journal.

Mike de Vetter, creator of Little Leaders Big Lives has worked with children and youth for the last 25 years and has a burning desire to see children know God, love their identity, discover their purpose and make a difference in life. Married to Amy and with 3 little leaders of their own, Rosie, Josiah and Zoe, the de Vetters are Lead Pastors of Elim Christian Centre Whangarei, NZ and all passionate Liverpool FC supporters.

Born with the less than showbiz name of William McGechie, Willy de Wit spent his school years at Auckland Grammar, where he learnt music and classical ballet, then left early to work in a garden centre. While serving as the lead singer of band Rhythm Method, he decided on a whim to enter a comedy competition hosted by his local bar, Retro, in 1983. De Wit described his motivation to The Listener as coming "from the class clown thing. I thought, rather than getting caned for this I could make money from it." Although he won, it was his meeting with fellow contestants Dean Butler, Ian Harcourt and Peter Murphy which kick-started his long career in making people laugh. As Butler put it in this group interview for 2019 series Funny As: "then I get a phone call from Willy [...] saying, "Hey, we're thinking of forming a group. Do you want to be in?"" And so Funny Business was born. After starting off as a live comedy troupe, and winning regular full houses at Auckland's Windsor Castle, the quartet made a pilot show for TVNZ that never went to air. Kiwi comedy veteran Tony Holden was more enthusiastic about the result, and won funding for his company to make a Funny Business series in 1988. Writing collaboratively, and with the show's animations coming courtesy of Chris Knox, Funny Business quickly earned rave reviews, and inspired a national tour. Bruce Ansley of The Listener praised the show's "freshness and energy ... It is part satire, part recognition humour, part stand-up comedy. There's probably something in there to upset everyone... and there's certainly something to make everyone laugh". De Wit joked in a November 1988 Rip it Up interview of the team writing anonymous fan letters: "Dear TVNZ, we think Funny Business is the best show I've ever seen in my life." Despite earning a reputation as a jester, de Wit proved he wasn't all jokes by acting in 1988 short film Beyond Gravity. Screening at 10pm, Funny Business made its name in poking fun at the ordinary, rather than branching into political satire as had contemporary Public Eye, or predecessor A Week of It. One famous sketch saw de Wit leading a group of Mormons door to door, while another featured hoons hanging out on a beach with crates of beer. In both instances they claim they were mistaken for being the real deal. Recounting one incident where the cast had confused real-life Mormons, de Wit described "There we were all decked out in our Mormon gear ... when they came around the corner. They kind of did a double take as if to say 'oh, we thought we were doing this street.'" After successful international shows at Montreal's Just for Laughs comedy festival a long-delayed second season of Funny Business aired at the even later timeslot of 10.30pm - which wasn't necessarily a bad thing: "It kind of created a cult status". De Wit was then called up by David McPhail, whom he had worked with briefly on sketch show McPhail and Gadsby in 1985. De Wit went on to join the ensemble on The Issues and More Issues. Although Funny Business was no longer a going concern, he would continue to work with many of the group, including with Dean Butler and Ian Harcourt on More Issues. This was despite de Wit's initial verdict of an early Butler performance at the Retro, "thinking he'll never work". As the 90s progressed de Wit found himself in a run of comedy shows including TV3's That Comedy Show (where his many roles included James Bond). That Comedy Show was nominated for Best Entertainment Programme in 1995, and in 1996 he shared the award for Best Performance in an Entertainment programme with Mark Wright, for the Christmas episode of sports panel show Sportsnight. The following year de Wit was part of the writing team that picked up the Best Script Comedy award for ensemble sketch show Comedy Central. In 1998 he co-wrote and acted in Double Booking, alongside Kevin Smith and Theresa Healey. The half-hour tale was part of the Kiwi Comedy Playhouse series, with the plan that the highest rating episode would be chosen for a series. Although none eventuated, Booking's chief writer James Griffin was awarded Best Comedy Script at the 1999 NZ Television Awards. Griffin had worked with de Wit before - he was the script-editor on Funny Business. In 1998 de Wit shifted into another branch of broadcasting: radio. For the next 12 years he hosted shows for Radio Hauraki alongside ex Funny Business collaborator Dean Butler. The pair left Hauraki's breakfast show in 2010. In April 2016 de Wit suffered a stroke, which left him hospitalised. Despite this he maintained his sense of humour, asking for details from his hospital bed of how a recent TV commercial was doing.

R. de Wolf is a Maori fiction author born on the East Coast of New Zealand. She grew up in the Bay of Plenty and lived abroad for 29 years mainly in the UK and Australia. The stories R. de Wolf writes are interwoven with the issues she is passionate about equality, women's issues, empowerment, culture, the environment and how humans sit within the natural world. She also enjoys reading and writing poetry.

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R. de Wolf was born on the East Coast of New Zealand and is of Maori descent. After leaving New Zealand to travel the world, she lived overseas for 29 years, returning to New Zealand in 2014. Currently, she resides in Sunny Turanganui-a-Kiwa - Gisborne. The call to write came home with her. In 2020 R. de Wolf published her debut fiction novel, Guardians of the Ancestors - Book One of the Spirit Voyager Series, and short-story Crushed Violet, in Kaituhi Rawhiti - A Celebration of East Coast Writers. In 2021 The Future Weavers - Book Two launched in November, and a book of poems, Poetry in a Pear Tree, was published in December. De Wolf writes about the issues she is passionate about - equality, women's rights, the balance of nature, and the spiritual connection to our ancestors and place. A self-confessed nerd and Sci-Fi fan, The Goodness Algorithm is R. de Wolf's first dystopian novel.

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p.d.r. lindsay is passionate about words, feels the loss of people like Shakespeare , those who wrote the King James Bible, poets who made words dance, like Gerard Manley Hopkins. She's published over 100 short stories, 3 anthologies and 4 novels.

Author and Artist: memoh.memoh. (yes, all lowercase with the full stop) is an award-winning digital artist and comiker based in Auckland, New Zealand. A professional graphic designer by day, she has crafted visual identities for numerous national and international brands. By night, her fantasy-romance comic "Dominion" explores the battlegrounds caused by trauma, bias, and the seductive desire for control.