Renée (writer)

In October 2017, Renée published a memoir entitled These Two Hands, published by Mākaro Press.

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.

Renée was invited to attend the First International Women Playwrights Conference in New York in October 1988. She was one of three keynote speakers. She also attended the Pacific Writers Conference in London and took part of in a reading tour of Britain and Europe.

Some of 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 characters in Wednesday to Come include three generations of women in one family. Pass It On (1986) follows the two children in Wednesday to Come now that they have grown up and married. It celebrates the role of working-class women in the 1951 New Zealand waterfront dispute. Jeannie Once (1991), is a prequel to Wednesday to Come in that it focusses on the past of Wednesday to Come's Granna and her life as a seamstress in Victorian Dunedin. One of the characters in Jeannie Once is a Māori servant, Martha, who ends up being committed to an asylum. Jeannie Once features elements of Music Hall.

In 1979, Renée completed a Bachelor of Arts at Auckland University. Completed over ten years, much of her B.A. was gained through extramural study from Massey University.

In 1979, Renée relocated to Auckland to complete her B.A. at the University of Auckland. During this time, she worked as a cleaner at Auckland's Theatre Corporate. Six years later, she returned to Theatre Corporate as Playwright in Residence. Following her graduation, Renée worked at a secondary school teaching English and Drama. Renée began writing her first play Setting The Table on New Year's Day in 1981, the first draft of which was completed in five days. In a 1982 interview with New Zealand feminist magazine Broadsheet, Renée said she “wanted to write a play that showed women as intelligent, humourous [sic] and strong. I wanted to write a play with very good parts for women — that also put forward some political themes.”

Renee's attendance at the United Women's Convention in Wellington in 1975 was an important experience. The convention enabled her to recognise that "...a lot of the things I thought and felt resentful about were things other women thought and felt too." A feminist perspective became an important part of her theatre work and writing from that point onwards.

Renée Gertrude Taylor ONZM (born 1929), known mononymously as Renée, is a New Zealand feminist writer and playwright. Renée is of Māori (Ngāti Kahungunu), Irish, English, and Scottish ancestry, and has described herself as a "lesbian feminist with socialist working-class ideals". She wrote her first play, Setting the Table, in 1981. Many of her plays have been published, with extracts included in Intimate Acts, a collection of lesbian plays published by Brito and Lair, New York.