SAMOA AUTHOR · FICTION · POETRY
Albert Wendt
Albert Tuaopepe Wendt (born 27 October 1939) is a Samoan poet and writer who lives in New Zealand. He is one of the most influential writers in Oceania. His notable works include Sons for the Return Home, published in 1973 (adapted into a feature film in 1979), and Leaves of the Banyan Tree, published in 1979. As an academic he has taught at universities in Samoa, Fiji, Hawaii and New Zealand, and from 1988 to 2008 was the professor of New Zealand literature at the University of Auckland. Wendt is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including twice receiving the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Asia-Pacific region, multiple top awards at the New Zealand Book Awards, the 2012 Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction and an Icon Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand in 2018.
Most acclaimed
Photographs
In Albert Wendt's new poems, his first collection for over a decade, snapshots of the close and familiar contrast with strange and mythical sequences from a vast Pacific epic in progress and a vivid impressionistic montage of global travel in the late twentieth century. The rich diversity and range of Photographs is astonishing, as this complex writer moves with ease and fluency from ancient Polynesia to contemporary China to family celebrations in an Auckland garden, and through a variety of tones and voices. The collection celebrates grandchildren, family, ancestors and a heritage that stretches back to the atua; and shows a profound and compassionate understanding of the ways we now live in these islands.
The adventures of Vela
"Journey through the many stories and worlds of the immortal Vela, the Samoan song maker, poet, and storyteller - Vela, who was so red and ugly at birth they called him the Cooked; Vela the lonely admirer of pigs and the connoisseur of feet; Vela the lover of song maker Mulialofa. Follow Vela down through centuries as he encounters the single-minded society of the Tagata-Nei and the Smellocracy of Olfact and recounts the stories of Lady Nafanua, the fearless warrior queen, before whom travelling chroniclers still bow down today." "This novel stretches from hundreds of years before the arrival of Papalagi to the present day and fuses the great indigenous oral traditions of storytelling and Western poetry." --Book Jacket.
Nuanua
"Prose (mainly fiction) and poetry in English from the Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Soloman Islands, Tonga and Samoa"--P. 5.