Albert Wendt

Biography

In 1952 a boy from Apia won a scholarship and went to study at New Plymouth Boys’ High School in New Zealand. He was thirteen. Already in those years the school annual, The Taranakian, published several of his poems and a short story.

Wendt was born on 27 October 1939 in Apia, in Western Samoa (now Samoa), one of nine children of a plumber. His German ancestry comes from a great-grandfather on his father’s side, but in 2002 he said that he considered his family heritage “totally Samoan”. He finished school in 1957, gained a teaching diploma at Ardmore Teachers’ College in 1959, then studied at Victoria University of Wellington and in 1964 took a Master of Arts in history. His thesis dealt with the Mau, the Samoan movement for independence from colonial rule in the first decade of the twentieth century. He began publishing in literary magazines while still a student, and in 1963 the journal Landfall gave him an award for the best prose by a writer under twenty-five, for his short story “The Name of the Game”. By his own account he was inspired by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Jacquie Sturm and Hone Tuwhare, then the only well-known Polynesian writers in New Zealand.

In 1965 Wendt returned to Samoa and became headmaster of Samoa College. In 1972 he wrote two plays: “Comes the Revolution” was performed at the South Pacific Arts Festival, and “The Contract” was staged at the school drama festival in Apia. Around then he began a large family epic, “Leaves of the Banyan Tree”, but because of its length he put it aside and finished “Sons for the Return Home” first. The book, about a young Samoan in New Zealand, was published in 1973, and in 1979 it was made into a film directed by Paul Maunder, the first about Pacific Islanders in New Zealand. The novel lets Samoan speech into its dialogue, and that, to my mind, is the main thing that set it apart from the colonial prose of the time. In 1974 Wendt became a senior lecturer at the University of the South Pacific and worked in Suva and at the university’s Samoan centre. He published articles in the journal Mana, among them pieces on the effect of colonialism on the arts and culture of the region, and edited collections of poems from Fiji, Samoa, the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands. In 1974 came the short story collection “Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree”, stories written in the manner of modern fables; two of them were adapted for film by Martyn Sanderson in 1989. It was followed by his first poetry collection, “Inside Us the Dead” (1976), and the novella “Pouliuli” (1977). “Leaves of the Banyan Tree” (1979) won the Wattie Book Awards in 1980, as the best book of the year in New Zealand. From 1982 to 1987 Wendt was professor of Pacific literature at the University of the South Pacific and also pro-vice-chancellor.

In 1988 he became the first professor of New Zealand literature at the University of Auckland, and the first Pacific Islander appointed to a professorship in English there. He edited the anthologies “Nuanua” (1995), “Whetu Moana” (2003, with Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan) and “Mauri Ola” (2010). “Whetu Moana” was the first anthology of modern Polynesian poetry in English with Polynesian editors; in 2004 it won the Montana Award.

The novel “Ola” (1991), about a woman travelling the world, won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Asia-Pacific region. The author himself described “Black Rainbow” (1992) as an allegorical thriller, set in a dystopian New Zealand of the future. In 1994 Wendt was awarded the Order of Merit of Samoa for services to education and literature. In 1999 he was visiting professor at the University of Hawaiʻi, and in 2000 he gave the New Zealand Book Council lecture, “Le Vaipe: the Dead Water”.

In 2001 he was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. In 2003 he received the Senior Pacific Islands Artist’s Award, and in the same year his play “The Songmaker’s Chair” was staged for the first time, at the Auckland Arts Festival. In 2004 he won the Nikkei Asia Prize for Culture, and in 2005 Victoria University made him an honorary doctor of literature. Wendt retired from the university in 2008. As a visual artist, he held a solo exhibition in Auckland the same year.

His verse novel “The Adventures of Vela”, begun in the 1970s, was published in 2009 and brought him a second Commonwealth Writers Prize. In the same year he was made an honorary doctor of the University of Hawaiʻi. In 2012 he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction, and his ʻaiga, ʻAiga Sa-Maualaivao, conferred on him its highest title, Maualaivao, at a Samoan ceremony. In 2013 Wendt was appointed to the Order of New Zealand. In 2015 he published a memoir of his childhood in Apia, “Out of the Vaipe, the Deadwater”, and the novel “Breaking Connections”, and in 2018 the Arts Foundation of New Zealand presented him with an Icon Award.