Stories from inside life’s big top.

Posts tagged “refugees

Satellite Of Love: Massimo Maio

Posted on December 9, 2017

Massimo Maio moved to Berlin “for love”.   Migrating from a “small and cosy” village in southwest Germany, he says that “friends, radio and art” also had a lot to do with him pulling up stumps for the German capital.   Like me, Massimo has BIG LOVE for radio. It’s a fundamental part of his life and has been since he was a child. He’s also been working in the medium for many years, both as a producer and presenter, starting in the days of analogue, later embracing digital with its creative freedoms and disruptive potential.   Snap! We’re also died-in-the-wool public broadcasters.   Massimo and I first met in 2015 just after I moved to Berlin from Australia. I was co-teaching a two-day…

Woman Of Substance: Vanessa Ellingham

Posted on July 1, 2016

Human rights journalist, magazine editor and social storyteller Vanessa Ellingham seems to regularly be mistaken for someone else.   It’s something which has beset her for the past five years, since “Jasmine Cooper” first got glasses.   “Jasmine Cooper” is one of the characters on New Zealand’s most famous soap opera, ‘Shortland Street‘. It seems Vanessa and the actress who plays the troubled teenager share eerily similar features: honey-brown hair, perfectly-manicured bobs and cat’s eye glasses, framing heart-shaped faces and delicate smiles.   Both call New Zealand home. And as I discover soon after meeting Vanessa at a writers group in Berlin (where she now lives), it’s a case of mistaken identity the 25 year-old is wont to write about in hilarious, excruciating detail.…