Keri Hulme

Keri Hulme, born in 1947, New Zealand novelist, poet, and short-story writer, best known for her first novel, The Bone People (1983). The work won the Booker Prize, the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary award, in 1985, as well as New Zealand's Pegasus Prize for Maori Literature, in 1984.

Hulme, of English, Scottish, and Maori (the original peoples of New Zealand) ancestry, was born in Christchurch and educated at Canterbury University. She later worked as a tobacco picker, pharmacist's assistant, and postwoman. Her first published work was a poetry collection entitled The Silence Between: Moeraki Conversations (1982).

Hulme started The Bone People on the typewriter she had been given by her mother for her 18th birthday, and she wrote it during the period when she worked at the tobacco fields in Motueka, New Zealand. The novel took twelve years to complete. The book is the story of three characters—a woman, a man, and a young boy—all of whom are social outcasts. Hulme explores how their lives intersect and how each develops as an individual through the course of their relationships with each other.

Hulme has developed a writing style and vocabulary that are distinctly of New Zealand, even though they draw on the traditions of English, Irish, and American Literature. Her writing is often reliant on dream imagery and myth. Her other works include the novella Lost Possessions (1985), the short-story collection The Windeater/Te Kaihau (1986), and a second collection of poetry, Shards (1992).