In Marian Evans\u2019 written reflections on the award night <\/a>she says that she thought nobody understood the karanga and ultimately the night was \u201cstrange\u201d. One of her lasting memories attached to the prize-night photograph used in the newspapers next day was that \u201cthe photographer suggested that we stick our tongues out. I think he wanted us to pukana\u201d.<\/p>\n The Bone People remains one of Aotearoa\u2019s most precious and demanding texts. It is one of the most frequently invoked titles in The Spinoff\u2019s Books Confessional<\/a>, when writers are asked to state their best Aotearoa novel. I have read it twice: once as a 14-year-old and again as a 38-year-old. Both readings were entirely different and both readings changed me. It is an embodied experience to move through the lives of Kerewin (an artist), Simon (a deeply traumatised, mute child; a character who came to Hulme in a dream, she saw him dancing on the beach) and Joe (Simon\u2019s foster father, also traumatised) \u2013 to go through, with them, incredible pain and incredible transformation.<\/p>\n In an interview in Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, issue 12, 1994, Hulme says of her novel: \u201cI very much wanted\u2026 to be a bridge between my M\u0101ori relations and my P\u0101keh\u0101 relations, and I wanted very much to make explicit, explicable, the spiritual world. And I wanted to make clear why, when people are alienated from that, they do terrible things to themselves and to others. So there was no way I was going to water down, for instance, that final section, which for me is the heart of the book and points to the \u2018strangely bright future\u2019, with hope and healing.\u201d<\/p>\n In the clip of the 1985 Booker Prize ceremony, Hulme tells Lee that she\u2019s working on a novel titled Bait. That book, she says to Lee, draws from her real life experiences, unlike The Bone People. Twelve years later, in 1997, Hulme was recorded reading excerpts from the still unfinished novel<\/a>, calling it a story of \u201cdeath and fishing\u201d at the Going West Writers Festival. In the end, Bait was never published. Hulme\u2019s UK publisher at Picador, Peter Strauss, who had read 100 pages of the manuscript and described it as \u201cscintillating\u201d, tried to cajole Hulme into finishing it, but in the end was forced to accept that for Hulme the novel was not a priority.<\/p>\n Hulme\u2019s life post-Booker was full of what she loved most: painting and fishing and wh\u0101nau. She rarely gave interviews. When Hulme died on December 28, 2021 her nephew Matthew Salmons told Stuff<\/a> that she didn\u2019t seek adoration and her literary fame wasn\u2019t something she discussed.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is hard to think of any other novel, any other piece of art, in Aotearoa\u2019s history that has made such an impact on readers and on writers worldwide. You can see Hulme in the exceptional novels of Becky Manawatu<\/a>, in her potent lyricism, in the truth of the characters, the food and the water. You can see the Hulme in our poets like Arihia Latham, essa may ranapiri<\/a>, Ruby Solly<\/a>. British novelist and fellow Booker Prize winner for Girl, Woman, Other Bernadine Evaristo said that The Bone People was her favourite novel and has influenced her own work.<\/p>\n The future of The Bone People still lies with Spiral Collectives who are working with four different artists and four different writers to adapt the story into a series of four graphic novels. In Spiral Collectives\u2019 way, there is no publication date yet: \u201cit will take as long as it will take,\u201d Marian Evans, the last living member of the collective, told The Spinoff. There is an extensive and transparent explanation of the project online<\/a>, which includes how Hulme\u2019s wishes and kaupapa will be taken into account, particularly around the representation of child abuse in the book.\u00a0<\/p>\n After the graphic novels, there is talk of an animation adaptation, too \u2013 Hulme preferred the idea of animation over live action, and turned down over 100 offers both local and international to turn it into a film.<\/p>\n But, for now, the novel exists. In millions of copies and many languages. For those yet to read it, 2025 is an apt year to take it in, to let it work its potent and singular magic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A reflection on the controversy, the ceremony and the epic legacy of The Bone People and how it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[67199,57656,489,492,156,67200,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-111177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-becky-manawatu","tag-booker-prize","tag-books","tag-comments-enabled","tag-entertainment","tag-keri-hulme","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Keri Hulme with The Spiral Collectives, who published The Bone People.<\/p>\n
Keri Hulme (Photo: Philip Tremewan)<\/p>\n