As we know, 2005 is the twentieth anniversary of Keri Hulme’s The Bone People winning the Booker Prize. Associate Professor Lydia Wevers is the director of the Stout Research Centre – part of Victory University – whose aim to to ‘encourage scholarly inquiry into New Zealand society, history and culture’. Lydia has decided to put the two together in a two-day seminar focusing on the book.

But wait, there’s more: the idea is that this will be the inaugural session of the proposed ‘Association for the Study of NZ Literature’, which she hopes would meet annually or maybe every 18 months. As she says:

It really springs from a sense that while there have been very successful conferences on NZ Literature – especially at Otago, they are intermittent and there’s a lot of us working in the field who could perhaps exchange ideas and research more regularly.

And what other book could you start with, really? Love it or hate it, Keri Hulme’s landmark novel was written in an radical and inimitable style; its publication, nomination, and eventual winning of the Booker Prize aroused heated debate (sorry to harp on, no really) and still does; there have been many, many articles and theses on it. The question is: what do we think of it now?

The Stout Research Centre will host this event over the weekend of the 5/6 November. Anyone is warmly invited to present a paper on the book. If you wish to do so, you must email Lydia.Wevers@vuw.ac.nz with a 200 word abstract (a summary of what your paper is going to be about) by 5 September.

You can go and watch even if you don’t plan to present a paper. Hopefully Keri herself will be there. If you plan to go, please email Lydia or Sarelle.Reid@vuw.ac.nz.