Kiwi author and playwright dies
New Zealand author and playwright Rene´ e has died, aged 94. The self-described “lesbian feminist with socialist working-class ideals” died peacefully at home, her publisher, agent and son said in a statement released that night.
Born Rene´e Gertrude Taylor 1929, she started writing seriously only after she turned 50 — using her first name as “the only one she felt was hers”.
Of Ngāti Kahungunu descent, she was born in Napier and attended Greenmeadows School.
Her best-known work, according to the statement, was Wednesday To Come, “a play about the women in a workingclass family coping in the Depression
… famously set around a coffin and includes scones being baked on stage”, first performed in 1984.
She continued to write into her 90s, publishing her first crime novel just a few years ago, followed by a sequel — both shortlisted for the Ngaio
Marsh Awards. She was interviewed by RNZ’s Kim Hill in 2017, the then 88-year-old considering herself very lucky to still have most of her marbles.
Rene´e also continued to teach and mentor other writers in her final years, and presented literary awards.
“Books — plays, poetry, short stories, novels, nonfiction — they feed us, they heal the broken places, they teach us new things, lead us back to old,” she said in a 2022 lecture.
She was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2006, for services to literature and drama.
Rene´e lived in Otaki ¯ until October 2023, when she moved into a Wellington retirement home. She is survived by two of her three sons.