25 Facts About Keri Hulme

Keri Ann Ruhi Hulme was a New Zealand novelist, poet and short-story writer.

Keri Hulme was born on 9 March 1947 in Burwood Hospital, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Keri Hulme's father was a first-generation New Zealander whose parents were from Lancashire, England, and her mother came from Oamaru, of Orkney Scots and Maori descent.

Keri Hulme grew up in Christchurch at 160 Leaver Terrace, New Brighton, where she attended North New Brighton Primary School and Aranui High School.

Keri Hulme described herself as a "very definite and determined child who inherently hate[d] assumed authority".

Keri Hulme remembered herself as being interested in writing from a young age.

Keri Hulme rewrote Enid Blyton stories the way she thought they should have been written, wrote poetry from the age of 12, and composed short stories; her mother organised the side front porch into a study for her after her father's death.

The family spent their holidays with her mother's family at Moeraki, on the Otago East Coast, and Keri Hulme identified Moeraki as her, "the standing-place of my heart".

Keri Hulme worked in a range of jobs, including in retail, as a fish-and-chips cook, a winder at a woollen mill, and as a mail deliverer in Greymouth, on the West Coast of the South Island.

Keri Hulme was a pharmacist's assistant at Grey Hospital, a proofreader and journalist at the Grey Evening Star, and an assistant television director on the shows Country Calendar, Dig This and Play School.

Keri Hulme continued writing, and had her work published in journals and magazines; some appeared under the pseudonym Kai Tainui.

Keri Hulme received Literary Fund grants in 1973,1977, and 1979, and in 1979 she was a guest at the East-West Center in Hawaii as a visiting poet.

Keri Hulme held the 1977 Robert Burns Fellowship and became writer-in-residence at the University of Otago in 1978.

Keri Hulme submitted the manuscript for the bone people to several publishers over a period of 12 years, until it was accepted for publication by the Spiral Collective, a feminist literary and arts collective in New Zealand.

Keri Hulme was the first New Zealander to win the Booker Prize and the first writer to win the prize for their debut novel.

In 1985, Keri Hulme was writer-in-residence at the University of Canterbury and in 1990 she was awarded the 1990 Scholarship in Letters from the Queen Elizabeth Arts Council Literature Committee for two years.

Keri Hulme served on the Literary Fund Advisory Committee and New Zealand's Indecent Publications Tribunal.

Around 1986 Keri Hulme began working on a second novel, BAIT, about fishing and death.

Keri Hulme worked on a third novel, On the Shadow Side; these two works were referred to by Hulme as "twinned novels".

In 1973, Keri Hulme won a land ballot and became the owner of a plot in the remote coastal settlement of Okarito in south Westland, on the South Island of New Zealand.

Keri Hulme built an octagonal house on the land and spent most of her adult life there.

Keri Hulme vocally opposed plans to develop the settlement with additional housing or tourist facilities and believed it deserved special government protection.

In late 2011, Keri Hulme announced that she was leaving the area as local body rates meant she could no longer afford to live there.

Keri Hulme legally changed her name to "Keri" in 2001.

Keri Hulme died from dementia at a care home in Waimate on 27 December 2021, at the age of 74.