Albert Wendt

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Albert Wendt, CNZM (born 1939, Apia, Western Samoa) is a Samoan poet and writer. Among his works is Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979).

He studied at Ardmore Teacher´s College and at the Victoria University of Wellington, graduating with an M.A. in history. He returned in 1965 to Western Samoa, becoming principal of Samoa College. In 1974 he moved to Fiji, where he taught at the University of the South Pacific.

In 1977 Wendt returned home to set up the University of the South Pacific Center in Samoa. He worked closely with the literary journal Mana, and edited in 1975 collections of poems from Fiji, Western Samoa, the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and the Solomon Islands.

Wendt's epic Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979), won the 1980 New Zealand Wattie Book of the Year Award. Wendt was awarded the first chair in Pacific literature at University of the South Pacific in Suva. In 1988 he took up a professorship of Pacific studies at the University of Auckland. In 1999 Wendt was visiting Professor of Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawai'i. In 2001 he was made Companion of the Order of New Zealand for his services to literature.

[edit] Works

  • Comes the revolution, 1972
  • The contract, 1972
  • Sons for the Return Home, 1973 - also made into feature film
  • Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree: And Other Stories, 1974 - also made into feature film
  • Pouliuli, 1977
  • Inside us the Dead. Poems 1961 to 1974, 1976
  • Leaves of the Banyan Tree, 1979
  • Lali. A Pacific Anthology, 1980 (ed.)
  • Shaman of Visions, 1984
  • The Birth and Death of the Miracle Man, 1986
  • Ola, 1991
  • Black Rainbow, 1992
  • Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English since 1980, 1995 (ed.)
  • Photographs, 1995
  • The Best of Albert Wendt's Short Stories, 1999
  • The Book of the Black Star, 2002
  • Whetu Moana, a collection of Pacific poems, 2002 (ed.)
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