The writer Keri Hulme, who has died aged 74, was the first New Zealander to win the Booker prize, in 1985, for the bone people (as she chose to style the title), and the first person to win for their debut novel.

Keri had recently received the Pegasus prize for Māori literature and was in the US on a promotional tour when the Booker ceremony took place in London. Representatives from her publishers, Spiral Collectives, extended a karanga (formal greeting) and accepted the award on her behalf. Keri’s own response, in a phonecall with the literary critic Hermione Lee, was: “You’re pulling my leg. Bloody hell.”

Others shared Keri’s surprise. “The guests … on the whole, seemed baffled by the choice of winner,” noted the Financial Times. “Certainly the strangest novel ever to win the Booker,” according to the Guardian. Yet she was acclaimed in her home country, where the prime minister welcomed her with a parliamentary reception.

These contrasting responses reflect reactions from publishers, critics and readers ever since Keri, an expert fisher, first presented the manuscript deliberately woven as a “word-net”, with “holes” in the narrative. She wanted every reader’s experience to affect what they trawled, beginning with her mother, Mary Miller, also an expert fisher, and Keri’s first reader and only editor.

Described by Keri as a “new kind of novel, blending reality with dreams, melding Māori and Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent), weaving strange and hurtful pasts into strangely bright futures”, the bone people is about three damaged individuals. Two are Māori, Kerewin, an “offshoot” of Keri, who “escaped out of my control and developed a life of her own”, a reclusive and asexual artist estranged from her family and unable to paint, and Joe, who has lost his wife, his child and hope. The third is Joe’s foster child, the mute, feral and enchanting Simon.

They almost become an unlikely whānau (family). But, separated by violence, they make individual voyages of renewal before reuniting, the adults committed, as tangata whenua (indigenous people), to protect the land’s mauri (life force and essence).

Keri defined the book as essentially a lament, with destructive and furious elements. It explains why individuals and communities alienated from the “old ways” of the spiritual world “do terrible things to themselves and to others”; and illuminates how keeping the faith and restoring authentic māori (human) values can help heal the most horrific abuse. As Tiaki Mira, the book’s kaumātua (elder), concludes, “Eternity is a long time … Everything changes, even that which supposes itself to be unalterable. All we can do is look after the precious matters which are our heritage, and wait, and hope.”

Keri began writing the bone people in 1965 after Simon appeared in her dreams. But publishers that she approached either rejected the book or wanted radical rewrites she was unwilling to make. She held a wake for the manuscript, planning to encase it in perspex for use as a doorstop.

Then, in 1981, as a regular exhibitor at the Women’s Gallery in Wellington, she encountered Spiral Collectives, a women’s literary and arts group that had never published a novel.

Irihapeti Ramsden, Miriama Evans and (no relation) Marian Evans, one of the writers of this piece, the trio who later accepted Keri’s Booker prize, trusted the integrity of her “word-net” because of their own experiences. Irihapeti recalled lying in the wharenui (ancestral house) as a child, listening while the elders conversed through the night; she responded to how, on the page, Keri conveyed the feeling of that oral tradition’s rhythms and patterns. Miriama characterised it simply as a good Māori novel that she and her relatives would read. In print since 1984, in English and other languages, the bone people was most recently translated into Spanish (2018).

Born in Ōtautahi, or Christchurch, Keri was the eldest of Mary (nee Miller) and John Hulme’s six children. Mary came from South Island iwi (tribes) Ngāi Tahu and Kāti Mamoe, as well as Orkney, Scotland, and John from Lancashire, England. Both ran businesses, John a sawmill at one point. After John died when Keri was 11 she helped Mary care for her siblings; until her death in 2019 Mary was central to Keri’s life.

From an early age and throughout her time at Aranui high school Keri was a storyteller, reader and artist. Her studies in law at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), lasted only four terms, but, taught to respect all her ancestral lines, she continued her scholarly investigations into mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and western arts and science; both systems and her love of Papatūānuku (Mother Earth) imbued her literary and artistic inventions, and playful use of language and form.

Until the bone people’s success, Keri sustained herself through occupations that ranged from tobacco picker to journalist, supplemented by grants, residencies and help from family. She also built herself a house at Ōkārito, on the South Island’s west coast, where she lived for more than three decades, with frequent sojourns in Moeraki on the east, model for the bone people’s Moerangi.

Keri’s stated priorities were: “First in my life is my family. My friends. My kāitahutaka (Ngāi Tahu culture). This wondrous archipelago we’re privileged to live in. And next, my recreations: fishing, food, art – including writing – reading and music.” A loner, but companionable, “because tribe and community are sanity”, and renowned for her hospitality and generosity, Keri described herself as androgyne, aromantic and asexual.

At the Women’s Gallery in 1980, as “a neutral observer at the fringe of the fire”, she presented the longform poem He Hōhā (Annoyance) about her experience of the female body: “It is a cliche that once a month, the moon stalks through my body, / rendering me frail and more susceptible to brain spin; / it is truth that clamp and clot and tender breast beset – but then / it is the tide of potency, another chance to walk the crack / between worlds”.

Other literary publications include a novella, Lost Possessions (1985); a short-story collection, Te Kaihau: The Windeater (1986); Homeplaces, with the photographer Robin Morrison (1989), a poetry collection, Strands (1993), a libretto for Anthony Ritchie’s opera Āhua, the Story of Moki (2000), and a collection of stories and poems, Stonefish (2004). One short story, Hooks and Feelers, was made into a film (1983).

Keri’s last major publication, in 2016, was a two-volume artist book of her first poetry collection, The Silences Between: Moeraki Conversations (1982). She left two unfinished novels: Bait and On the Shadow Side.

Keri is survived by three siblings, Diane, John and Kate, two nieces and five nephews.

• Keri Ann Ruhi Hulme, writer and artist, born 9 March 1947; died 27 December 2021