be stuck". Off-screen, she spearheaded a campaign to introduce a compulsory New Zealand music airplay quota for New Zealand radio. It resulted in a petition of 250,000 signatures being presented to Parliament. New Zealand radio stations agreed to a voluntary quota of New Zealand music content. She was the inaugural chair of the Auckland chapter of Women in Film and Television. In 1987, Hay moved to London with partner Andrew Fagan, ex-lead singer of rock band The Mockers. The couple lived on a houseboat on the River Thames. It was here that she wrote her first novel Emerald Budgies. Karyn returned to New Zealand with Andrew in 1989. They returned to England in 1996 where she had two children She returned to television presenting in 2008 for Rocked the Nation and the 2015 documentary NZ Women in Rock. In February 2018, Hay began a late night radio show on RNZ National Lately, With Karyn Hay. In September 2022 it was announced that Hay's show would be extended earlier into the evening to replace the departing Bryan Crump's night show. Author Emerald Budgies was described in the blurb as "a darkly comic tale of drug addiction and betrayal". It was first published in England, in 2000, under the nom de plume Lee Maxwell (her middle names). She had wanted to throw off her previous public image but, on the promotional tour that followed, she said she felt like an imposter in a spy movie. "I started thinking, maybe I don't want to be this new person, maybe it's not so bad being Karyn Hay." Kate Camp described Emerald Budgies as 'raw, thoughtful and very funny'. Chris Knox said it 'was not for the queasy... Imagine 1980s Doris Lessing crossed with Bret Easton Ellis and you're some way to imagining what this book reads like'. For Denis Welch it was, "A relentlessly bleak – if extremely funny – vision of modern life with no redemption whatsoever for anyone anywhere . . . There are times when Emerald Budgies makes Trainspotting look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.’ Emerald Budgies won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction in the 2001 Montana Book Awards. and Hay was awarded a Frank Sargeson Fellowship in 2004. Her second novel, The March of the Foxgloves, was published in New Zealand in 2016. Set in 1893, the book touches on the 19th century trade in