ABSTRACT
Keri Hulme is the author of The Bone People (1984), a novel which won
the Booker Prize in 1985, and a collection of short stories Te Kaihau/The
Windeater (1986). Among her other publications are two collections of
poetry: The Silences Between/Moeraki Conversations (1982) and
Strands (1992). Rima Alicia Bartlett interviewed her at her home in
Okarito, in the South Island of New Zealand: ‘A letter, a plane, a train, a
bus and there she was at a fork in the road. We drove for miles down the
hill until we reached the place of the lagoons and the sea. I found myself in
a quiet land, suffused with soft light, a land where the greenstone trails
wind through the mountainous backbone of the land, a land called Te
Wahi Pounamu; Pounamu can be interpreted as greenstone or jade, a
sacred stone to Maori people; wahi can mean place. As I walked over the
shingles of this beach of many currents, where the winds and waters meet, I
bent and picked up the grey stones, pressure moulded and water woven.
