New Zealand writer Keri Hulme - who won the 1985 Booker Prize for her debut novel The Bone People - died this week at 74.
In 2011, she spoke to Noelle McCarthy about her writing and her home in the tiny West Coast township of Ōkārito.
Keri Hulme Photo: Jane Zusters
For many years, Hulme lived in a "self-built" house she began constructing in her late 20s, with carpentry skills learnt from her painter-decorator father John.
She told Noelle McCarthy she was unconcerned about the imperfections of the house, which was based on her family crib at Moeraki "where spiders would be a fact of life".
"I suppose you could, if you were really vicious, go round and spray everything and not have the delights of meeting new creatures. Or you could have a cat - which is a real no-no in Ōkārito - and frighten all the birdlife away."
In the house, Hulme's library of around 12,000 books acted as insulation: "It's comfortable for me. It's basically book-lined, it's a library."
The Bone People, which took 17 years to write, had its genesis in a short story Hulme wrote when she was tobacco-picking in Motueka in the late 1960s, she said.
After famously being passed over by numerous publishers, the novel was eventually picked up in 1983 by the Spiral Collective - a small 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."
New Zealand writer Keri Hulme pictured in 1987. Photo: Bernard Weil / Toronto Star via Getty Images
In The Bone People, Hulme explores the relationships between three characters: reclusive painter Kerewin Holmes, alcoholic widower Joe Gillayley, and his young mute foster son, Simon.
In 1984, the novel won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and the Pegasus Prize for Māori literature. In 1985, The Bone People received the ultimate literary accolade - Britain's Booker Prize.
The Bone People focuses on the "mysterious relationships between three unorthodox outsiders of mixed Māori and European heritage" according to the Booker Prize website.
Hulme (who has tribal affiliations to Ngāi Tahu and Ngāti Māmoe) said that growing up she felt herself both "obviously Māori " and "obviously Pakeha".
Despite receiving criticism for portraying herself as a Māori writer, Hulme made no apologies for referencing both her Māori and 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 the novel, Hulme said she sought to realistically depict domestic violence, which she witnessed in her extended family.
"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."
Hulme - who says she was born a Presbyterian, converted to Catholicism at 18 and moved on to "some kind of Taoism" in her early 20s - was always been interested in the power of religion.
"My [beliefs] are somewhat nebulous and wide - things like impermanence, things like whakapapa. Not the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost or whatever, which to me is very narrowing and being a human being means that you are full of possibilities."
Yet she also had little hope that humans will be able to "learn quickly enough what we are doing to the world and to each other".
"I deeply long for things to come right, for us to become a wiser creature."
