KERI HULME (1947, Otautahi Christchurch) Novelis, short story writer and poet Became famous with The Bone People (1984) White father (died when Keri was 11), Maori-Paheka mixed mother Spent school holidays with Maori family: ‘I love it better than any place on Earth. It is my turangawaewae-ngakau, the standing-place of my heart.’ Starts writing poetry and short stories from the age of 12 Aged 18, tobacco picker in Motueka, started having dreams about a mute, long- haired, grinning child with strange, green eyes, from whom the name Simon Peter ‘seemed to resonate’. Continued having dreams about this boy. Wrote about him in the short story ‘Simon Peter’s Shell’, resulting 12 years later in “The Bone People” Won many awards: Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award (Hooks and Feelers, 1975), Maori Trust Fund Prize for writing in English (1977), Booker Prize 1985 (The Bone People)

Respects all facets of her ancestry: Maori, Celtic, Norse mythology, uses fragments of Maori language and relates to modernist writing cultural eclectism. But: ‘I think of myself as a Maori writer rather than Pakeha that’s the strong and the vivid and the embracing, the good side of things. That’s where I draw my strength from.’ Uses binary categories:  Paheka – Maori, male – female, realism – fantasy, life – death. Dreams, thoughts, memories play a central role in her work.

The Bone People - rejected by 4 publishers (Maori language, stylistic experimental way of writing) - published by The Spiral Collective in 1984 Kerewin: she ‘has always been a bit of an off-shoot of me—a sort of wish- fulfilment character for what she owned, a shallow alter ego’, nonetheless ‘she escaped out of my control and developed a life of her own’. A self-styled neuter, like her character Kerewin, Hulme lives alone in the octagonal house she built in Okarito, on the West Coast of the South Island, where she engages her creativity (writing, painting and drawing) for nine months of the year; the other three months are spent entertaining family. Critics commented on the deeply negative nature of Hulme’s writing despite her wry humour and the celebration of things like fishing, cooking, eating, drinking, playing the guitar and painting. The bone people has very negative atmosphere, concluding with an optimistic reconciliation of the (cultural, ethnic, interpersonal and narrative) tensions played out in the fiction. Other works: Lost Possessions (1985), Te Kaihau: The Windeater (collection of short stories, 1986)., Strands (poem collection, 1992) Source: