Sarah Gaitanos spoke about her new book, “Shirley Smith: An Examined Life” (VUP, 2019), on Sunday 19 May at this year’s Auckland Writers Festival. This popular event was sponsored by the Friends of Turnbull Library, as the inaugural talk of three years of celebrating research in the collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library.

Sarah says: “The Turnbull Library has been like a home to me for many years since researching for my biography of Nola Millar. In that case it was not just a treasure trove but also a subject of my research as Nola Millar worked there in the 1930s and 40s, becoming reference librarian until she gave it all up for theatre. The Shirley Smith papers are in the Turnbull, my oral history projects are too, and I belong to the FoTL so I’m delighted to be the inaugural speaker.”

Sarah Gaitanos is an independent writer, researcher and oral historian.