Trailblazers: Keri Hulme

Keri Hulme was the first New Zealander to win the Booker Prize.

Keri Hulme Author 1947

First New Zealander to win the Booker Prize

In 1985, Keri Hulme made history by becoming the first New Zealander to win the Booker Prize with her novel The Bone People. The year before, Hulme won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction, after a lengthy editing process and small first print run which received positive reviews.

Of Māori, Celtic and Norse heritage, Hulme is the oldest of six children and, like many authors, recalls writing and creating stories from her early childhood years influenced, in her case, especially by family holidays on the Otago East Coast. Her mixed heritage, and this landscape itself, weave through her short stories, poetry collections and novels.

On leaving school, Hulme decided not to go to university and worked in Motueka as a tobacco picker. She recalls, aged 18, having the first of numerous dreams about a mute, long-haired child with strange green eyes whom was christened Simon Peter. He became a character in her short stories which, eventually, formed the basis for The Bone People.

In the years before the book's publication, Hulme tried writing full-time but found it too hard to make a living so resorted to a series of menial part-time jobs. These allowed her time to refine her writing and the publication of a number of stories and poems, some written under the name Kai Tainui, saw her win several awards including the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award.

Hulme followed The Bone People with a collection of poems and short stories but none have received the critical response or success as her Booker prize-winner. A keen fisherwoman, she maintains a low profile and gave her last interview in 2014.

For many years, she lived alone in the octagonal house she built in Okarito, on the South Island's West Coast but it is thought she now divides her time between there and Oāmaru.

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