Keri Hulme

Hulme grew up in Christchurch of mixed Kāi Tahu, English, and Scottish descent, left university without finishing a degree, and supported herself through years of itinerant work (fishing, tending a tobacco farm, running a fish-and-chip shop, sorting mail) while writing in relative isolation at Ōkārito, a tiny settlement on the South Island's west coast where she eventually settled permanently.

The Bone People, begun in the early 1960s and revised across nearly two decades, was rejected by mainstream publishers before a feminist collective finally printed it in 1984; the following year it won the Booker Prize, becoming the first novel by an Indigenous New Zealand writer, and the first small-press title, to do so.

She never published another novel, though she continued writing poetry and short fiction, living quietly at Ōkārito until her death in 2021.