Actor, journalist and playwright Elisabeth Easther is best known for playing villainous nurse Carla on Shortland Street. She also hosted a remake of her mother, Shirley Maddock’s, 1960s TV series Islands of the Gulf for TVNZ. In 2017 she edited Bird Words, an anthology of New Zealand bird writing which led to the creation of A Rare Bird, a one-woman play about ornithologist Perrine Moncrieff which continues to tour Aotearoa. Winner of the Adam Best NZ Play Award in 2014 for her play Seed, a novel based on the script of that play is being published by Penguin Random House at the end of 2025.