Renato Amato: The Italian ‘with a lot to tell us’

But Renato Amato “had only just begun to tell us”, according to Maurice Shadbolt, when he died from a brain haemorrhage aged 35. Half a century later, Susan Jacobs pays tribute to a talent cruelly cut short.

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16th June, 2012

Review

It was a gray, bleak April day in Wellington in 1964. A small group of people stood around an open grave at Karori Cemetery. Just as the coffin was being lowered, a short rumple-haired, dishevelled man came hurrying jerkily – “like a little leprechaun”, recalls one mourner – through the cemetery up to the grave. He crossed himself, then threw a handful of dirt onto the coffin. It was James K Baxter. Like other writers, some established, some fledgling, he had come to pay homage to his friend, a little-known but emerging writer from Italy who had made New Zealand his home 10 years earlier. Renato ...

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