Keri Hulme
Hulme, Keri (1947–2021), novelist, short story writer and poet, gained international recognition with her award-winning The Bone People. Within New Zealand she has held writing fellowships at several universities, served on the Literary Fund Advisory Committee (1985–89) and the Indecent Publications Tribunal (1985–90), and in 1986–88 was appointed ‘cultural ambassador’ while travelling in connection with The Bone People.
Born and raised in Otautahi, Christchurch, Hulme is the eldest of six children. Her father, a carpenter and first-generation New Zealander whose parents came from Lancashire, died when Hulme was 11. Her mother came from Oamaru, of Orkney Scots and Maori descent (Käi Tahu, Käti Mämoe). Hulme was schooled at North New Brighton Primary School and Aranui HS (Christchurch). Her holidays were spent with her mother’s extended family at Moeraki, on the Otago East Coast, a landscape filled with the residue of its Maori past, which remains important for linking Hulme with her Maori ancestors: ‘I love it better than any place on Earth. It is my turangawaewae-ngakau, the standing-place of my heart.’
The Bone People (Spiral Collective, 1984) won the 1984 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction, and the prestigious international Booker Prize in 1985. 'Set on the harsh South Island beaches of New Zealand, bound in Maori myth and entwined with Christian symbols, Miss Hulme's provocative novel summons power with words, as a conjuror's spell. She casts her magic on three fiercely unique characters, but reminds us that we, like them, are 'nothing more than people', and that, in a sense, we are all cannibals, compelled to consume the gift of love with demands for perfection' (New York Times Book Review).
Source: Read NZ https://www.read-nz.org/writer/hulme-....
“Writing isn’t my life…it’s a lovely part of my life... but it’s not my life. My life is family, friends, fishing, food…things like reading and painting and all the rest of it, and you can’t really prioritize when you’re involved with family or you’re involved in fishing, you can’t say, ‘Oh, I really should be writing.”
“She had debated, in the frivolity of the beginning, whether to build a hole or a tower; a hole, because she was fond of hobbits, or a tower — well, a tower for many reasons, but chiefly because she liked spiral staircases.”
“A family can be the bane of one's existence. A family can also be most of the meaning of one's existence. I don't know whether my family is bane or meaning, but they have surely gone away and left a large hole in my heart.”
“The smarter you are, the more you know, the less reason you have to trust or love or confide.”
“You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they've been read...”
“Why? is the boy's motto, why does, why is, why not? Food, weather, time, fires, sea and season, clothes and cars and people; it's all grist to the mill of why.”
“The childhood years are the best years of your life… Whoever coined that was an unmitigated fuckwit, a bullshit artist supreme. Life gets better the older you grow, until you grow too old of course.”
“I am in limbo, and in limbo there are no races, no prizes, no changes, no chances. There are merely degrees of endurance, and endurance never was my strong point.”