Keri Hulme, prize

winner, Maori writer

Maori writer, Keri Hulme, has won the internationally-re nowned Pegasus Prize for Liter ature with her first novel, ’’The Bone People.” The book has received critical acclaim both in New Zealand and overseas and Ms Hulme is now regarded as a major new Pacific writer leading what some regard as a renaiss ance in a long-hidden literary tradition.

The Pegasus Prize was estab lished by the Mobil Corpora tion in 1977 as a means of drawing international attention to literature which might other wise remain relatively un known. Previous winners in clude novelists Sami Bindari (’’The House of Power”), and Sabri Moussa (’’Seeds of Corruption”), of Egypt, Firsten Thorup (’’Baby”) of Denmark, Tidiane Dem (’’Masseni”), of the Ivory Coast, and Ces Nooteboom (’’Rituals”), of Hol land.

As her prize Keri Hulme receives $4OOO, a gold medal, an all-expenses-paid promotio nal tour of the United States, and publication of her book by the Louisiana State University Press. ’’The Bone People” has also won the $3OOO New Zea land Book Award for fiction.

In the last 10 to 12 years Maori writers have begun to emerge in considerable num bers. An anthology published by Margaret Orbell in 1970 included the work of 14 Maori authors. Another collection in 1982 had 39 writers, and the numbers continue to grow, as does their recognition.

Hone Tuwhare, whose 1964 collection of poems ”No Ordin ary Sun,” was the first book by a modern Maori writer to be published, has just accepted an invitation to be an artist in residence in Berlin throughout 1985. The Maori short story writer, Bub Bridger, has just returned from London where she represented Maori women at the first Feminist Internatio nal Book Fair.

The Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship sends a New Zealand writer to Menton in France each year for a period of full-time writing. This year’s

fellow is the Maori writer, Row ley Habib. While in France he will attend an exhibition of Maori art in Paris.

Witi Ihimaera, who turned his second novel ’’Whanau” into the opera ’’Waituhi” and who is now working on a huge book, ’The Matriarch,” will also be at that exhibition, having flown in from New York where he re cently attended the opening of the ’Te Maori” art exhibition.

He also visited Rome to prom ote the opera. ’’Waituhi” is set in a small Maori community near Gis borne, and examines the prob lems of land ownership, the flight to the cities of the young, and the loss of traditional know ledge. Witi wrote the libretto with music by Ross Harris. ’The Matriarch” which is ex pected to run to something like 1200 pages when published, looks at four generations of a Maori family and is set around the character of Artemis Man ana. All of this enthusiasm for Maori writing has been capped by the appointment in David Lange’s government of a Maori, Dr Peter Tappsell, as minister for the arts.

Keri Hulme was bom in Christchurch in 1947. Her hapu (sub-tribe) are Ngaterangiamoa and Ngaiteruahikihiki, and her whakapapa (ancestry) includes the Orkney Islands and Lan cashire. She lives alone in a house she built herself in the extremely isolated West Coast area of Okarito where she sup ports herself by writing, whitebaiting and part-time work at the Franz Josef Glacier post office.

In 1979 she was invited to the East-West Center in Hawaii and this year she read her work at the Adelaide Festival and was a writer-in-residence in Mel bourne. She will also be giving a lecture series at Macquarie University, NSW, and readings at the Nimrod Theatre in Syd ney.

Her first book of poems, ’’The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations)”, was published by Auckland Univer sity Press/Oxford University Press, in 1982. Victoria Univer

sity Press are publishing her third book, a collection of stories, ’The Wind Eater.” Keri is the current holder of the New Zealand Literary Fund’s Bur sary for Writers.

Her success has come only after years of work in bitter isolation, the condition of many Maori writers caught between cultures and languages. At 25 she bought for $650 a derelict house in Greymouth on the west coast of the South Island, and began to write full-time on her birthday, March 9. ”By August,” she said, ”1 was starving to death. If it had not been for my mother ringing up periodically and saying: ’Keri, how are you ... we’ll send you over some money...’ Things were fairly desperate.” Even now her meals often depend as much on her fishing as on her royalties. ’’The Bone People” began as a short story called ’’Simon Peter’s Shell” typed out on her first typewriter at nights after a day’s work in the Motueka tobacco fields. It took 12 years for the story to become a novel of 469 pages. Three New Zea land publishers turned it down on the grounds that it was too long, or too unwieldy, or too different. It was finally pub lished by a group called the Spiral Women’s Collective, a grup led by Elizabeth Ramsden, Marian Evans and Miriama Evans. Don Long and PIM Staff Writers.