Praise for Albert Wendt, winner of the USP Press Literature Prize

Albert Wendt was announced the overall winner for the 2011 University South Pacific (USP) Press Literature Prize and awarded $3000 USD. The international writing competition held earlier this year also marked the launch of the South Pacific University Press, the publishing division of South Pacific University.

 Albert, one of New Zealand’s most renowned Pacific writers, shared his success with his niece Lani Wendt Young, who won the fiction section of the competition with her collection of short stories titled, Sleepless in Samoa.

Albert’s prize-winning manuscript for the USP Press Literature Prize, Ancestors, follows his winning title, Adventures of Vela, in the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for the Asia Pacific Region in 2010 published by Huia Publishers.

Albert Wendt is an acclaimed Samoan–born novelist who 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 is Emeritus Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland where his particular research interests are new literature in English, especially Māori and Pacific fiction and poetry and Pacific art and history.