Keri Hulme

New Zealand novelist, poet, and short story writer

• Born: March 9, 1947
• Birthplace: Christchurch, New Zealand
• Died: December 27, 2021
• Place of death: Waimate, New Zealand

Biography

Born in Christchurch, on New Zealand’s South Island, Keri Hulme identifies not with her primarily “Pakeha” (European) family but with the Maori culture of her maternal grandfather, Tommy Rakakino Mira. The Maori, the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand, figure prominently in all Hulme’s writings, both poetry and prose. While Hulme is reticent in discussing many of the details of her early life, she has said that she was raised with a strong sense of her Maori cultural background and that she developed a keen interest in the Maori language and stories.

Hulme is the oldest of six siblings. Her father died when she was eleven. In 1965, at age eighteen, Hulme left home and moved to Motueka in to work as a tobacco picker. It was there that she first heard colloquial Maori and met North Island Maori, whom she had previously thought existed only in stories. During this time, Hulme wrote “Simon Peter’s Shell,” a short story that would later form the nucleus of her best-known work, The Bone People (1984). Starting in 1967, she briefly attended Canterbury University in Christchurch, intending to pursue a law degree, but she soon left and returned to tobacco picking.

Hulme subsequently worked a number of odd jobs, including as a cook, a shedhand, and an assistant postmaster. She continued writing throughout this time, working on new material as well as developing the story of Simon Peter. When she was twenty-five, she attempted to make a living as a full-time writer, but she had to return to work after nine months.

In 1982 Hulme published her first book of poetry, The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations), exploring the unique rhythms and concepts within the Maori tongue. She was, and continues to be, impressed by the delicate shadings of meaning inherent in the understanding of the language, finding words in themselves to be powerful and emotionally stirring. Poetry came naturally to Hulme both as a child and as an adult, so it is appropriate that her works celebrate the languages of both the Maori and the Pakeha.

When Hulme completed her first draft of The Bone People and submitted it to a publisher, she was told it would have to be significantly shortened. She trimmed down the manuscript, though not by the recommended half, and continued to revise and submit it, eventually completing seven drafts. She received four outright rejections and herself refused a number of offers from publishers who suggested further drastic revisions. Finally, three women—Victoria University of Wellington professor Miriama Evans, freelance editor Marian Evans, and nursing educator Irihapeti Ramsden—formed the Spiral 5 collective, a small publishing collective associated with the arts and literary magazine Spiral, which had been founded in the mid-1970s by a group of feminist artists and writers that included poet Heather McPherson. The Spiral 5 collective was formed specifically to publish three books that had been rejected by all other New Zealand publishers: A Figurehead: A Face (1982), a poetry collection by McPherson; The House of the Talking Cat (1983), a short-story collection by Jacqueline Cecilia Sturm; and Hulme’s The Bone People.

In The Bone People, three people—Kerewin Holmes, an artist living in self-imposed exile; Simon Peter, a dreamlike mute boy; and Joe Gillaley, Simon’s abusive foster father—find themselves becoming a family battered by the internal pressures of their relationships and the external pressures of the world that seeks to separate Joe from Simon. The novel describes, in bitter detail, the terrible physical abuse to which Joe subjects his foster son, only to seek the same child’s love and loyalty. It is both a portrait of a culture foreign to most Western readers and a realistic picture of the strains inherent in an abusive family.

Initially Spiral 5 printed only two thousand copies of the novel, thinking, as Hulme later noted, that they “had enough relations between [them] all to buy at least half.” Yet word of mouth spread, and the first run sold out in six weeks, while a second printing sold out in only two. Hulme was astonished at the immense popularity of her novel achieved. The Bone People won the 1984 New Zealand Book Award for fiction as well as the Pegasus Award for Maori Literature, sponsored by the Mobil oil company. (Somewhat infamously, New Zealand author and critic C. K. Stead objected to her winning the latter prize due to her being only part Maori; Hulme responded by pointing out that the judges were all themselves Maori, “in good standing both academic and otherwise,” and concluded, “C. K. Stead presumes to know better than them. He is wrong, on all counts.”) In 1985, it won the prestigious Booker-McConnell Prize, now the Man Booker Prize, for the year's best English-language novel published in the United Kingdom. (Hulme had already lost a thousand-dollar bet with her mother that the book would not even be short-listed.) Critics described The Bone People as similar to the works of Laurence Sterne and James Joyce while also acknowledging it as an innovative work derived from the intimate fusing of style and content.

Hulme followed up The Bone People with Lost Possessions (1985), a part-poetry, part-prose work that has variously been described as a novella and a poetry collection. She has also published two collections of short stories, Te Kaihau / The Windeater (1986) and Stonefish (2004), and another volume of poetry, titled Strands (1992). In addition, she teamed up with photographer Robin Morrison to publish Homeplaces: Three Coasts of the South Island of New Zealand (1989), a sort of geographical autobiography. All these works, in one way or another, reflect the passions of the Maori culture as well as the rhythms of the Maori language.

Hulme, who describes herself as an artist, fisher, writer, and Maori woman, was among the earliest public figures to come out as asexual. She enjoys an isolated life in Okarito, on the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island, where she reportedly writes for nine months of the year and hosts family for the remaining three.

Author Works

Long Fiction

The Bone People, 1984

Short Fiction

Lost Possessions, 1985

Te Kaihau/The Windeater, 1986

Te Whenua, Te Iwi/The Land and the People, 1987

Poetry

The Silences Between: Moeraki Conversations, 1982

Strands, 1992

Stonefish, 2004

Nonfiction

Homeplaces: Three Coasts of the South Island of New Zealand, 1989

Bibliography

Armstrong, Philip. “Good-Eating: Ethics and Biculturalism in Reading The Bone People.” ARIEL 32.2 (2001): 7–27. Explores the ramifications of biculturality in both reading and writing Hulme’s novel.

Benediktsson, Thomas E. “The Reawakening of the Gods: Realism and the Supernatural in Silko and Hulme.” Critique 33.2 (1992): 121–31. Academic Search Complete. Web. 13 Apr. 2016. Examines “ruptures” in literary realism in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Hulme’s The Bone People.

Fee, Margery. “Keri Hulme: Inventing New Ancestors for Aotearoa.” International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers. Ed. Robert L. Ross. New York: Garland, 1991. 53–62. Calls The Bone People part of a postcolonial discourse that challenges values established by imperialist powers. Discusses Hulme’s use of traditional narrative frames, which tease the reader into expectations that Hulme then ignores or reshapes.

Hulme, Keri. “Keri Hulme in Conversation with John Bryson.” Antipodes 8.2 (1994): 131–35. JSTOR. Web. 21 Apr. 2016. Present an interview with Hulme in which she describes her influences and inspirations.

Ramsey, Nancy. “A Prizewinner Explains Why 8 Walls Are Better Than 4.” The New York Times, 1 Dec. 1985, www.nytimes.com/1985/12/01/books/a-prizewinner-explains-why-8-walls-are-better-than-4.html. Accessed 13 Apr. 2016. Describes the efforts of the Spiral Collective to publish The Bone People.

Stead, C. K. “Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, and the Pegasus Award for Maori Literature.” ARIEL 16.4 (1985): 101–8. Provides a thoughtful critical discussions of feminist and Maori implications for The Bone People.

Tacon, Shana. “Waves from the Shore: Women Writing the Sea in Oceania.” Hecate 26.2 (2000): 160–70. Academic Search Complete. Web. 13 Apr. 2016. Hulme is one of several writers whose water imagery is analyzed.

Wilentz, Gay. Healing Narratives: Women Writers Curing Cultural Dis-ease. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000. Hulme is one of several authors whose depiction of mental illness and its healing is discussed.