Keri Hulme Biography

I have a grave suspicion that Life is a vast joke: we are unwitting elements of the joke.

It is not a nice or kind joke, either.

I write about people who are in pain because they can't see the joke, see the point of the joke.

What I write is fantasy-solidly-based-in-reality, everyday myths.

I rarely write out of a New Zealand context and, because I am lucky enough to be a mongrel, draw extensively from my ancestral cultural heritages—Maori (Kai Tahu, the South Island tribe), Scots (the Orkneys), and English (Lancashire). (Remember that the Pakeha elements of my ancestry predominate, but they have been well-sieved by Aotearoa.) I want to touch the raw nerves in NZ—the violence we largely cover up; the racism we don't acknowledge; the spoliation of land & sea that has been smiled at for the past 150 years—and explore why we (Maori & Pakeha) have developed a very curious type of humor which not many other people in the world understand, like, or appreciate and which is a steel-sheathed nerve I want to hide inside.

I'm not particularly serious about anything except whitebaiting. (Whitebait are the fry of NZ galaxids: they are a greatly relished and very expensive-about $75NZ a kilo—delicacy. I whitebait every season.)

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