5:30pm – 6:30pm  Honoured Writer: Renée

Renée Taylor is a legend both as a theatre writer and an outspoken advocate for women’s rights. She is of Māori (Ngāti Kahungunu), Irish, English and Scottish ancestry. Like Madonna and Adele, Renée is known by her Christian name alone. Humorous, humanist and perceptive, Renée has a lifetime of lived experience in her work and words. She has described herself as a lesbian feminist with socialist working-class ideals, but she is also a gifted and important storyteller in Aotearoa, always writing from her perspective as a woman and a lesbian. She wrote her first play Setting the Table in 1981. At the age of 88, she has just published a memoir, These Two Hands, in which she looks both back and forward in her characteristically wry way, commenting on life, her own work, the stage and the world. 

Chaired by the inimitable and insightful Carole Beu