The Bone People (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Keri Hulme was born on March 9, 1947 in Christchurch, New Zealand, to a mother of mixed Maori and Scots heritage and an English father. Her father died when Hulme was eleven. By that time, she had already demonstrated her potential as a writer, creating poems and short stories and rewriting published stories that she thought she could improve. To encourage her daughter (the eldest of six siblings), Hulme's mother converted a sun porch into a writing studio. When Hulme was eighteen, she had a dream about a mute, mysterious boy with long hair and green eyes. From this dream, she modeled the character of Simon in her first novel. Like her protagonist, Kerewin Holmes, Keri Hulme identifies most with her Maori heritage. Also like her protagonist, Hulme left home early and worked odd jobs, one in a tobacco field, another for the New Zealand post office system. She spent one year at the University of Canterbury.

In 1972, at the age of twenty-five, Hulme decided to write full time. She had several short stories and poems published. In 1975, she won the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Prize for her short story "Hooks and Feelers." A few years later, she accepted the position of resident writer at Otago University, and later she also worked at the University of Canterbury.

Silences Between, published in 1982, was Hulme's first collection of poetry. The Bone People appeared in 1984. This novel first began as a short story, but it kept growing. Hulme received many rejections from publishers before a small collective of women decided to publish the book. They ran four thousand copies on the first printing, and the books sold out quickly.

Hulme's other works include a collection of short stories, The Windeater (1982), Homeplaces (1989), a collection of essays and photographs retaining to New Zealand, and a second collection of poems called Strand (1992).