Renée Taylor

Renée Gertrude Taylor (; 19 July 1929 – 11 December 2023), known professionally as Renée, was a New Zealand feminist writer, playwright, novelist and short story writer. She started writing plays in her 50s, with her first play, Setting the Table, written in 1981, and with her most well-known works being the trilogy of plays beginning with Wednesday to Come. Renée described herself as a "lesbian feminist with socialist working-class ideals", and her plays feature strong female characters who are often working class.

Renée wrote into her 90s, and in addition to over twenty plays wrote short stories and novels in a range of genres including family life, romance and crime, and an autobiography in 2017. She received a number of notable awards during her career, including the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction in 2018.

Early life Renée was born in Napier, New Zealand, on 19 July 1929. She was of Māori (Ngāti Kahungunu), Irish, English, and Scottish ancestry. Her mother was Māori and her father was Pākehā (New Zealand European); he committed suicide when she was four years old. Renée's mother taught Renée to read at an early age.

Renée attended Greenmeadows School in Napier,

In later years, she said that she "never got over" not going to high school and that the absence of friends her own age was in part what led to her love of reading. Her early favourite works included Anne of Green Gables and books by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. She said she did not realise it was a political statement at the time.

During her time studying, Renée worked as a cleaner at Auckland's Theatre Corporate. Six years later, she returned to the Theatre Corporate as a Playwright in Residence. She went on to write many plays which feature women and working-class people in leading roles,

Renée's best-known plays form a trilogy, beginning with Wednesday to Come (1984) which shows the effect on a family of the 1930s Great Depression in New Zealand. The play is set around a coffin and features scones being baked live on stage. A 1994 review in Hecate described it as "in many respects, stronger and more complex" than the first two plays, exploring New Zealand's history and the role of women in families; it criticised the play however for being "too safe" and not strongly confronting feminist issues. She also attended the Pacific Writers Conference in London and took part in a reading tour of Britain and Europe together with Patricia Grace.

In addition to her plays, Renée also wrote a short-story collection, Finding Ruth (1987), and three novels in the 1990s which all feature themes of non-traditional families. and was the writer-in-residence at the University of Waikato in 1995. extracts of her work were included in Te Ao Marama (volume 1, 1990) edited by Witi Ihimaera, and in Intimate Acts (1997), a collection of lesbian plays published by Brito and Lair, New York.

Later life and death: 2000–2023

Renée continued to write into her later years, with novels written in her 70s including The Skeleton Woman: A Romance (2002) and Kissing Shadows (2006).

In her 80s Renée began writing crime fictions and teaching workshops on how to write it. Both crime novels were shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel. Her plays continue to be read and performed; in 2019 the trilogy beginning with Wednesday to Come was published in a single volume by Victoria University Press as a VUP Classic, Shortly after her death The Spinoff published a series of tributes to Renée from Patricia Grace, Mary McCallum, Matariki Williams and many other New Zealand writers and readers. Peter Tapsell, then New Zealand's Minister for the Arts, described her as one of the most distinguished playwrights in New Zealand. Later in that year, she was separately awarded a Literary Fund bursary worth $10,000 to work on her first novel.

In the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours, Renée was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature and drama. In 2013 she was awarded the Ngā Tohu ā Tā Kingi Ihaka at the Creative New Zealand Te Waka Toi awards for her lifetime contribution to Māori art.

In 2017 she received the Playmarket Award, a $20,000 prize recognising a playwright who has made a significant artistic contribution to theatre in New Zealand. In 2018 she received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction, worth $60,000 and presented by Jacinda Ardern.

Selected works Plays

1981 Setting the Table 1992 Tiggy Tiggy Touch Wood 1992 Pink Sports and Mountain Tops

Fiction 1987 Finding Ruth (short story collection) 1990 Willy Nilly 1993 Daisy and Lily 1995 Does This Make Sense to You? 1997 The Snowball Waltz 1997 I Have to Go Home 2002 The Skeleton Woman: A Romance 2005 Kissing Shadows 2019 The Wild Card 2022 Blood Matters

Other works 1998 Let's Write Plays (textbook) 2017 These Two Hands (autobiography)