The Auckland-based author was studying the diaries of Dunedin poet, literary editor and arts patron Charles Brasch, and kept coming across entries about "a wonderful poet" by the name of Ruth Dallas.
"I didn’t know Ruth at all and I only came to her work fairly late.
"I was reading Charles Brasch’s diaries and I thought, ‘who is this wonderful poet’?
"So I thought, well, I’ll look her up in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and she wasn’t there.
"So I emailed them and said, ‘this is a quite important woman poet’, and the historian there said, ‘well, maybe you could write an entry on her for the dictionary’."
Soon after her research on Dallas started, Dr Morrow discovered how important she was to New Zealand’s literary and cultural history.
And with the copious amounts of information she had on the poet and children’s author, she could write an entire book about her.
"So it grew from a seed, really."
On Saturday, the biography, titled Ruth Dallas: A writer’s life, was officially launched alongside a collection of Dallas’ poems, titled This Moment, Every Moment: Ruth Dallas collected poems, edited by Nicola Cummins.
The double book launch was held at the Dunedin City Library and was attended by about 60 people.
"In terms of her career, she always did exactly what she felt was right for her — she wasn’t swayed by literary fashions or anything like that.
"She had a kind of down-to-earth approach to her life. She wasn’t pretentious.
"She had an idea of what she wanted to do and she did it, which wasn’t easy at the time, because it was in the 1950s and for a female poet, there were a lot of male reviewers and men who were prominent figures in the literary world, and they had ideas about women poets.
"But she just went ahead and did her work. She remained steadfast to her goals as a writer and as a poet."
Dallas was born in Invercargill in 1919 and her first poem, Morning Mountains, appeared in The Southland Times in 1946.
Her real name was Ruth Mumford, but she adopted her maternal grandmother’s name, Dallas, as her pen name for her first book of poetry, Country Road and Other Poems, which was published in 1953.
As a child, she longed to read stories that were set outdoors in New Zealand, rather than set indoors in England.
So, after she moved to Dunedin in 1954, she also began writing children’s books which explored New Zealand history and society. She went on to become one of New Zealand’s most distinguished and widely read poets and children’s authors.
Saturday’s double book launch included talks with Dr Morrow and Ms Cummins, followed by performances of Dallas’ poetry set to music by soprano Cathy Highton-Sim and composer Anthony Ritchie.
