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Profile
Keri Hulme is a novelist, short story writer and poet. In 1985, she gained
international recognition with her first novel the bone people when she
became the only New Zealander to have won the Booker Prize. the bone people
spoke directly to many New Zealanders with its vision of a society regenerated
by the adoption of Māori values and spirituality. Sales of this book have
exceeded a million copies.
Selected published works
The Silences Between, 1982; the bone people, 1984, Mobil
Pegasus Award 1984, New Zealand Book Award for Fiction, 1984, and the Booker Prize, 1985;
Lost Possessions, 1985; Te Kaihau: The Windeater, 1986; Homeplaces:
Three Coasts of the South Island of New Zealand (with Robin Morrison),
1989; Strands, 1992; Stonefish, 2004.
Publishers
Huia Publishers www.huia.co.nz
Picador www.picador.co.uk
Penguin Putnam www.penguin.com
Louisiana State University Press www.lsup.com
S. Fischer Verlag wwwfischerverlage.de
Biography
Keri Hulme is of Kai Tahu and Kāti Māmoe descent and was born
in Otautahi in 1947. She worked in a succession of menial jobs, broken only
by a flirtation with university study, while she took her first tentative steps
as a writer.
Hulme’s writing reflects a range of influences, notably magic realism
and even science fiction. In homage to her mixed ancestry, Māori, Celtic
and Norse mythology is threaded through her work, but Hulme has often declared
herself to be Māori by spirit and inclination: “I think of myself
as a Māori 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.”
Her novel the bone people was awarded the 1985 Booker Prize,
and she remains the only New Zealander to have achieved that distinction. She
has won several other awards for her writing, including the Bank of New Zealand
Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award for her short story Hooks and Feelers, 1975, The Māori Trust Fund Prize, 1977, the ICI Writer's
Bursary, 1982, and the Literary Fund Writer's Bursary in 1983. In 1990 Keri Hulme was awarded the New Zealand Scholarship in Letters.
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