MEDIA RELEASE: HUIA Publishers
12 March 2010

Albert Wendt wins Commonwealth Writer’s Prize

‘The Adventures of Vela’ by Albert Wendt, one of New Zealand’s and the Pacific’s foremost storytellers, has won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for the Asia Pacific Region.

Photo - Albert Wendt, Winner Best Book, with Glenda Guest, Winner Best First Book and Nicholas Hasluck QC, Chair, Commonwealth Writers Prize.

“It is a great honour to be recognised in this way” said Albert Wendt at the Awards Ceremony in Sydney last night. “Vela has been a character I have thought about for a long time so this has been a lifetime’s work”. The Adventures of Vela was published by Aotearoa New Zealand-based Huia Publishers. Huia Managing Director Robyn Bargh attended the winners ceremony with Albert Wendt. “We were honoured to have published The Adventures of Vela and to see Albert’s work recognised in this way shows he is one of the worlds leading indigenous writers”.

Regional Chair for South East Asia and Pacific, Dr Anne Brewster said “The high standard of books in the South East Asia and Pacific region this year ensured that the short-listing process was a challenge for the judges”. This year’s finalists included J. M. Coetzee (Australia and Nobel Prize Winner), Peter Carey (Australia) and Thomas Keneally (Australia).

The Adventures of Vela will now go through to the final phase of the competition where an international judging panel will meet to decide the overall Commonwealth winners for Best Book and Best First Book with other regional winners from Africa, Caribbean, Canada, South Asia and Europe. The panel will meet in Delhi, India and the announcement of the two overall winners will take place on Monday 12 April 2010.

Albert Wendt was Professor of New Zealand and Pacific Literature at the University of Auckland from 1988 to 2006, and held the Citizens’ Chair at the University of Hawaii from 2004 to 2008. He is now Emeritus Professor at the University of Auckland, and is writing and painting full-time.
He is of the Aiga Sa-Maualaivao of Malie, the Aiga Sa-Su’a of Lefaga, the Aiga Sa-Malietoa of Sapapaali’i, and the Aiga Sa-Patu and Sa-Asi of Vaiala and Moata’a.

About The Adventures of Vela
Journey through the many stories and worlds of the immortal Vela - Vela, 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 the Boneman.
Follow him down through the centuries on his travels, encountering the single-minded society of the Tagata-Nei and the Smellocracy of Olfact. Accompany him, too, as he recounts the stories of Lady Nafanua, the fearsome warrior queen, before whose powers travelling chroniclers still bow down today.
'This novel-in-verse, with its chronicles of Samoa's immortal songmaker Vela and other divine figures, is the result of a lifetime's incubation and a slow rendering that owes a debt to both indigenous oral traditions and Western literature. A book that holds you in its grip (and that grip is the enticing voice of the storyteller), Vela is a sumptuous feast that brings to mind the resonating layers of Dante's Divine Comedy or Boccaccio's Decameron.' Guy Somerset, (Top 100 Books 2009, NZ Listener, 12 Dec 2009).

About Albert Wendt
Acclaimed Samoan-born novelist Albert Wendt has been an influential figure in the developments that have shaped New Zealand and Pacific literature since the 1970s, writing numerous works of fiction and several volumes of poetry, and editing notable anthologies of Pacific literature.
He has been a professor of New Zealand literature at the University of Auckland. The Songmaker's Chair was his first full-length play while his latest book 'The Adventures of Vela' has been shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers Prize for South-East Asia and Pacific.
Albert Wendt was awarded the 1980 Wattie Book of the Year for Leaves of the Banyan Tree and a Montana Book Award for Whetu Moana in 2004.
Two of his books, Sons for the Return Home and Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree, have been made into full-length feature films.

And report from Sydney Morning Herald.