The Booker Prize 1985

The year in which the pipe-smoking Kiwi Keri Hulme won the prize with her one and only novel, The Bone People. It was a win that baffled some in the tight-knit literary world.

Hulme was the first New Zealander to win the prize and came to it the hard way, supporting her career as a poet by working as a tobacco picker (hence her love of pipes and cigars). Hulme’s Maori heritage informs her book, which was turned down by several publishers.

‘Undoubtedly Miss Hulme can write,’ ran one rejection letter, ‘but unfortunately we don’t understand what she is writing about’, before being picked up by a small feminist collective. Three of its members would collect the award on her behalf - in full island dress and chanting a Maori praise song.

Winner: The Bone People

Shortlist: The Bone People; Illywhacker; The Battle of Pollocks Crossing; The Good Terrorist; Last Letters from Hav; The Good Apprentice

Watch: the 1985 Booker Prize ceremony

Watch the full Channel 4 broadcast of the controversial 1985 Booker Prize winning ceremony, including interviews with the shortlisted authors and the deeply divided judges.

‘Despite the violence… I find it to be a book of some considerable joy.’ Author Keri Hulme shares her thoughts on her powerful and influential 1985 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Bone People, including the relationships between the main protagonists – both Māori and Pākehā (white people).

Watch the moment Keri Hulme’s The Bone People is announced as the 1985 Booker Prize winning book, and hear Hulme’s immediate reaction just after on the phone to Hermione Lee.

Remembering Keri Hulme

How The Bone People changed the way we read

Striking, poetic and magnificent - or lamentable, unreadable, and indefensible? Discover the story behind The Bone People - one of the most divisive novels in Booker Prize history.

Winner The Booker Prize 1985

The Bone People

By: Keri Hulme: winner of the 1985 Booker Prize
Published by: Hodder & Stoughton

Keri Hulme’s Booker Prize-winning novel focuses on the mysterious relationships between three unorthodox outsiders of mixed Maori and European heritage.