Keri Hulme
In 1985, Keri Hulme won the Booker Prize for her novel The Bone People, one of the most prominent literary awards a writer working in English can receive.
Born on 9 March 1947 in Christchurch, Hulme attended Aranui High School before building a career as a poet and novelist. She wrote in English and held New Zealand citizenship throughout her life. Alongside the Booker Prize, she received the Robert Burns Fellowship and the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award, recognitions that came at various points across her working life as a writer.
Hulme continued to produce work in both poetry and fiction across the decades that followed. She died on 27 December 2021 in Waimate, at the age of 74. The Booker Prize she received in 1985 for The Bone People stands as a concrete marker in her career as a novelist.
Quotes by Keri Hulme
I have a grasshopper and haphazard mind y’know, a brain that listens to all sorts of things as well as itself.
Betelgeuse, Achenar. Orion. Aquila. Centre the Cross and you have a steady compass. But there’s no compass for my ever disoriented soul, only ever beckoning ghost lights. In the one sure direction, to the one sure end.
Through poverty, godhunger, the family debacle, I kept a sense of worth. I could limn and paint like no-one else in this human-wounded land: I was worth the while of living. Now my skill is dead. I should be.
There really is no place like home, even when it’s grown a couple of sizes too small...
It’s the possibility that when you’re dead you might still go on hurting that bothers me.
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.
I have faced Death. I have been caught in the wild weed tangles of Her hair, seen the gleam of her jade eyes. I will go when it is time – no choice! – but now I want life.
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.