Literary Birthday – 9 March – Keri Hulme
Keri Hulme was born 9 March 1947 and died 27 December 2021.
Keri Hulme Quotes
- You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they’ve been read…
- The smarter you are, the more you know, the less reason you have to trust or love or confide.
- A family can be the bane of one’s existence. A family can also be most of the meaning of one’s existence. I don’t know whether my family is bane or meaning, but they have surely gone away and left a large hole in my heart.
- The childhood years are the best years of your life… Whoever coined that was an unmitigated fuckwit, a bullshit artist supreme. Life gets better the older you grow, until you grow too old of course.
- Writing isn’t my life…it’s a lovely part of my life… but it’s not my life. My life is family, friends, fishing, food…things like reading and painting and all the rest of it, and you can’t really prioritise when you’re involved with family or you’re involved in fishing, you can’t say, ‘Oh, I really should be writing.”
Keri Hulme was a New Zealand novelist, poet, and short story writer. She also wrote under the pen name Kai Tainui. She used slipstream fiction techniques in her writing. Her only novel, The Bone People
, won the Booker Prize in 1985. She was the first New Zealander to win the award, and also the first writer to win the prize for a debut novel. Hulme also published the collections of short stories, Stonefish and Te Kaihau/The Windeater, and the collections of poetry Lost Possessions and Strands. In 1990, she was awarded the New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal. Hulme lived a quiet life, not often granting interviews, and spending time with family and on her passions of writing, painting, and whitebaiting.
Source for image: Philip Tremewan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Keri_Hulme_at_the_bar.jpg
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