Accomplished New Zealand writer Keri Hulme died yesterday at the age of 74 after facing chronic medical issues.
Award-winning New Zealand writer Keri Hulme: 9 March, 1947 - 27 December, 2021. Photo: Bernard Weil / Toronto Star via Getty Images
Her nephew Matthew Salmons told RNZ Hulme had been suffering from dementia for years and she died about midday yesterday.
Salmons said Hulme was an icon for the family.
"For us, it was her efforts and sort of reconnecting our whānau with our whakapapa Māori, with our Kāi Tahu roots, with our whenua, that's been the greatest gift that she's given us and it's a long-lasting legacy that we're all intensely proud of."
He said her literary works and successes had resonated with the family but she would be remembered by him primarily as a generous and "incredibly caring person, a very family-focused person".
Hulme was a real adventure to be around, Salmons said.
"She always had the most incredible stories to share ... she could have a conversation with my uncles about hunting, a fierce political debate with someone and then still have a conversation with one of the cousins about their favourite Pokémon and seem an expert in all fields and make you feel special."
The family would be organising a private burial for his aunt, Salmons said.
Hulme became a full-time writer at 25, but it was not until her critically-acclaimed novel The Bone People won the Booker prize that she began to make a serious living from her art.
Who was Keri Hulme?
Born in Otautahi Christchurch on 9 March, 1947, Hulme was the eldest of six children and had tribal affiliations to Ngāi Tahu and Ngāti Māmoe.
Māoritanga was very important to her and was a theme of her writing.
Listen to author Keri Hulme's conversation with RNZ's Spiritual Outlook programme from 2011
Other than The Bone People, Hulme wrote Homeplaces, Strand, Te Kaihau/The Windeater, and The Silences Between (Moeraki conversations).
She was also an accomplished painter and exhibited at group shows in the early 1980s.
The story of how The Bone People - Hulme's debut novel - came about became almost as well-known as the book itself: 17 years in the writing, Hulme told RNZ in 2011 that its long path to publication was testament to her own self-belief.
"The first moment of genesis for The Bone People was actually a short story that I wrote when I was tobacco picking at Motueka and that was back in the late 1960s," she said, with the final chapter not completed until December 1983.
"It was also evidence of the fact that I really believe in myself and I know what works," Hulme said.
"There's been a lot of criticism of that particular book inasmuch as I never let an editor near it."
After famously being passed over by numerous publishers, The Bone People was eventually picked up in 1983 by the small Spiral Collective - a publisher with a focus on female artists and voices.
"I'm delighted, both for family's sake and for Spiral Collective's sake that it actually worked out so extraordinarily well," Hulme told RNZ.
The novel explores the relationships between three characters: reclusive painter Kerewin Holmes, alcoholic widower Joe Gillayley, and his young mute foster son, Simon.
It won the 1984 New Zealand Book award for fiction, the Pegasus prize for Māori literature, and in 1985 the ultimate accolade - the Booker Prize in Britain.
The Booker website describes the book as focusing on the "mysterious relationships between three unorthodox outsiders of mixed Māori and European heritage".
Hulme said she was driven, in the novel, to address the impact of violence on both the victims and on those meting it out.
"It seemed to me that in some New Zealand works I'd read, violence ... by men, to women and children was just skated over, it was, you know, a thing that happened 'ho, ho, ho'.
"I wanted, if I could, to show it wasn't only dreadful to the victims of violence, it did horrible and corrupting things to those who perpetrated it."
She said she had also received some criticism for portraying herself as a Māori author, but made no apologies for that, noting the importance of both her Māori and her European roots in her writing.
"There's a couple of places in The Bone People where I make very definite recognition of all strands of my whakapapa."
In addition to the Booker prize, various of Hulme's works were honoured with the Katherine Mansfield Memorial award, for a short story in 1975, the Māori Trust Fund prize in 1978, the New Zealand writing bursary in 1984, and the Chianti Ruffino Antico Fattor award in 1987.
For many years Hulme led a solitary life in the tiny West Coast township of Ōkārito, where she was a devotee of whitebaiting and pipe-smoking.
She had more recently moved to Waimate in Canterbury and was living there when she passed away.