In a personal address tracing a lifetime of reading, the renowned playwright Renée explores the power of literature, and its role in shaping her own professional and imaginative worlds.

Although she grew up poor with a solo mother, the career of New Zealand playwright and author Renée seems, in retrospect, to have been pre-determined.

Why? Because of the love of reading which filled her childhood years.

In this lecture, Renée, aka Renée Gertrude Taylor, looks back over a life enthralled by words.

Listen to Renée deliver the 2021 Read NZ Te Pou Muramura Pānui

Edited highlights from the lecture

I was born in 1929, the year Jean Devanny left Aotearoa New Zealand for good because her novel The Butcher Shop had been widely condemned, and the year Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own was published. New Zealand readers were horrified and repelled by Devanny's novel. It was heresy.

This beautiful, idyllic, green and pleasant place, dotted with little white woolly clumps that baa-ed or larger brown clumps that moo-ed? Where the sun always shone? And this woman portrayed it as a violent and murderous place for both women and cattle? Oh, dear me, no. We can't have that.

It didn't help that Jean was a communist. Woolf, from an illustrious British upper-middle-class family, well-educated, married to Leonard, large house, servants, wrote about the necessity for a woman to have a room of her own.

At the time, I imagine I was only interested in sucking milk and sleeping, but I'd place a bet that my mother Rose read The Butcher Shop, and I wonder about her perspective as a farm worker's wife. As for Virginia's idea, a room of her own would never have occurred to Rose as a possibility - when she was growing up, she might perhaps have dreamed of a bed of her own...

My father shot himself in 1934, the year Ngaio Marsh's first crime novel A Man Lay Dead was published, and the year the Reform Party in New Zealand put off the election because they thought they'd lose.

There were no great thinkers in the Reform Party, but they got this one right. Gordon Coates, their finance minister, completely unable to explain his financial management even to his colleagues, or indeed anyone else, was said to have told out-of-job workers, who complained about a lack of money to feed their families, that they could eat grass…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details