Booker Prize-winning novelist Keri Hulme dead at 74

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Keri Hulme, the New Zealander whose 1984 debut novel The Bone People won the Man Booker Prize, has died. She was 74. Family members confirmed Hulme died at Waimate on New Zealand’s South Island. They did not specify a cause. Hulme worked as a tobacco picker, dropped out of law school and was a charity worker before becoming an unusual literary star when The Bone People, her first novel, won one of fiction’s greatest prizes. Hulme took almost 20 years to produce The Bone People, which drew on her indigenous Maori and Scottish heritage, weaving themes of personal and cultural isolation. She later shunned the spotlight.