Keri Hulme

Born Kerry Ann Ruhi Hulme on 9 March 1947 at Burwood Hospital in Christchurch, New Zealand, she was the eldest of six children of John William Hulme, a carpenter whose parents had come from Lancashire, and Mary Ann Miller, a credit manager from Oamaru of Orkney Scots and Māori descent, Kāi Tahu and Kāti Māmoe. Her father died when she was eleven. She went to North New Brighton Primary and Aranui High School, and Moeraki became what she called the standing-place of her heart. In 1967 she began an honours law degree at the University of Canterbury and left after four terms, then picked tobacco at Motueka and worked as a fish-and-chip cook, a winder in a woollen mill, a mail deliverer in Greymouth, a pharmacist's assistant, a proofreader and journalist on the Grey Evening Star, and an assistant director in television. In 1973 she settled at Ōkārito, a remote settlement in south Westland, where she lived alone and wrote for almost forty years. Her story Hooks and Feelers won the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award in 1975. The novel she had been working on since her teens went from publisher to publisher for about twelve years until Spiral, a small feminist collective, brought out The Bone People in February 1984; its first printing of 2,000 copies sold out in weeks. It won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction, and in 1985 the Booker Prize, the first for a New Zealander and the first for a debut novel. Poems, Lost Possessions (1985) and Strands (1993), and stories, Te Kaihau: The Windeater (1986) and Stonefish (2004), followed, while two twinned novels, Bait and On the Shadow Side, stayed unfinished. She called herself a Māori writer rather than a Pākehā one, and described herself as atheist, aromantic and asexual. She legally changed her first name to Keri in 2001. She died of dementia at a care home in Waimate on 27 December 2021, aged seventy-four.

On the night of the 1985 Booker Prize, Hulme was on a promotional tour in the United States, so the ceremony telephoned her, and her answer went out live on television: "You're pulling my leg, aren't you? Bloody hell." Three women from Spiral accepted the prize for her, chanting a karanga as they went up.