Booker's first Kiwi comes to town

By Linda Herrick - 19 March 2014

Keri Hulme is quitting the West Coast, and she'll be in the big smoke for Auckland Writers Festival.

NZ writer Keri Hulme. Photo / APN

For sale: hexagonal house in quiet position near top white-baiting lagoon in the heart of the South Island's West Coast. One careful lady owner: New Zealand's first Booker Prize-winner, Keri Hulme.

Hulme, 67, has put her house in Okarito, 150km south of Hokitika, on the market so she can move to Moeraki on the other side of the island. She has lived in Okarito for more than 40 years but described the small settlement a couple of years ago as being ruined by "ugly [holiday] McMansions". Her house, she reckons, is a bargain.
"If anyone wants to buy a self-built house full of borer, regularly visited by possums and rats, I have got just the property," she says on the phone from Oamaru where she has been staying with her mother.

Hulme, whose first (and only) novel the bone people (first edition cover left) won the Booker in 1985 and has gone on to sell more than three million copies worldwide, is making another journey, travelling by Jeep and train from her Westland home to Auckland in May.

She will make a rare public appearance at the Auckland Writers Festival where her novel has been nominated as the first annual Great Kiwi Classic. She will read from the book at the May 18 event, followed by a "giant book club" discussion between a panel and the audience.

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