Greatest Kiwi Of All Time: No. 73 - Keri Hulme
It was one of New Zealand’s greatest literary accomplishments. The first Booker Prize was awarded to a debut novelist, and the first kiwi to win one too. Kerry Hulme, making the Today FM list of the Greatest New Zealanders of All Time.
Keri Hulme was born in Christchurch, the eldest of six children. Her father was a first-generation kiwi from England and her mother was of Scottish and Māori descent. The diversity of her own background would feed into her storytelling in the years to come.
After high school, Hulme worked as a tobacco picker at one of Motueka’s many tobacco farms. She would go on to work at a fish ‘n’ chip shop, as a paper deliverer and - eventually - as a director on TV shows like Play School and Country Calendar. She continued writing, sometimes under the pseudonym Kai Tainui.
Hulme submitted The Bone People to many publishers over 12 years. It would finally go to print in 1984, winning the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction that year, and the Booker Prize the following year.
Keri Hulme lived in an octagonal house in the remote coastal settlement of Okarito for most of her adult life. She died from dementia in December last year, aged 74.
As New Zealand’s first winner of the Booker Prize - we wouldn’t win again until Eleanor Catton won for The Luminaries in 2013 - you can’t go past Keri Hulme on Today FM’s Greatest Kiwis of All Time countdown.
GKOAT 23 - Thanks to resene.
Today FM's Greatest Kiwis Of All Time, thanks to Resene - helping Kiwis decorate with NZ made paints since 1946.
