Don McGlashan – Composer/Songwriter
One of New Zealand’s best known and most highly regarded songwriters, Don McGlashan is also a singer and multi-instrumentalist who won early fame with three iconic Kiwi bands before going solo. He has also scored more than a dozen feature films and five TV series, including Jane Campion’s An Angel At My Table.
Don was drummer and singer with the band Blam Blam Blam, which had a string of top 20 singles and a successful album. His song ‘Don’t Fight it, Marsha, It’s Bigger Than Both of Us’ won Song of the Year at the 1982 NZ Recording Industry Awards.
After a year in New York as a drummer with the avant-garde Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians, he returned to New Zealand and founded The Front Lawn with Harry Sinclair. An acoustic group combining theatre and songs, they toured throughout Australasia, Europe and America, picking up many accolades, including three NZ Music Awards and another for a show at the Edinburgh Festival.
Through the 1990s, Don was singer and main songwriter for The Muttonbirds, who released four NZ top-ten albums and two top-five singles, winning Best Album, Single and Group at the 1993 NZ Music Awards. In 1994 his song ‘Anchor Me’ won the APRA Silver Scroll, NZ’s top song writing award. The group signed to Virgin Records UK in 1995, living in London for four years and touring all over the world.
More recently, Don released his third solo album ‘Lucky Stars’, which was very highly reviewed in both New Zealand and Sydney Morning Heralds. His latest album ‘Bright November Morning’ reached number one in the NZ Album charts. In 2023 he was inducted into the NZ Music Hall of Fame.
Hana Mereraiha – Writer/Translator
An accomplished Mātanga Reo (language master) and te reo (Māori language) champion, Hana Mereraiha is one of the country’s top translators. She holds a master’s degree in education and taught for seven years at a bilingual school in Christchurch. She has been a key translator for the Waiata Anthems project, working with such celebrated NZ artists as Tim Finn and Lorde, and for the release of ‘The Lion King’ in te reo Māori.
Hana describes her approach to translation as holistic, first establishing a sense of whanaungatanga or relationship with her collaborator – getting to know them on a human level – and then understanding the context and meaning behind the piece she is interpreting: how it came to life and what was the purpose for its creation.
Hana has also helped numerous artists reconnect to their whakapapa (ancestry) through her work. Her own whakapapa includes the Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Tama, Ngāti Koata, Te Ātiawa and Ngāti Mutunga tribes and sub-tribes of Aotearoa New Zealand.
