Keri Hulme is, best known for her groundbreaking novel The Bone People (1984), which won the Booker Prize in 1985. The novel is renowned for its innovative narrative structure and incorporation of Māori language and culture. Despite early rejections from mainstream publishers, Hulme's commitment to her vision led her to publish the book with the independent Spiral Collective. By the time Hodder and Stoughton published The Bone People in the U.K., making it eligible for the Booker, the novel had already won at the New Zealand Book Awards and sold out two local print runs.

From the mid-70s, she was actively publishing poetry, short stories, and novellas. In 1977, she was Otago University’s Burns Fellow and received several writing grants

Hulme published across different genres. Her poetry collection The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations) (1982) offers deeply reflective work influenced by the landscapes and seascapes of her life. Hulme’s story collection Te Kaihau: The Windeater (1986) was published shortly after her Booker win, and included Hook and Sinker, which won the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award. Her second major prose work, Stonefish (2004), is a collection of short fiction that delves into similar themes of isolation, human connection, and the interplay between Māori and Pākehā worlds.

Throughout her life, Hulme maintained a deep connection to her cultural roots and the natural world, living for many years in Okarito on New Zealand’s West Coast maintaining a deep connection to the land and sea that often influenced her work.

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📸 Philip Tremewan, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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