Last night, Albert Wendt won the $6000 Senior Pacific Islands Artist trophy at Creative New Zealand’s Arts Pasifika awards.

Professor Wendt's first novel, Sons for the Return Home, was published in 1973. Since then, he has written six novels, three collections of short stories, four collections of poetry and a play, and has edited numerous literary and poetry anthologies. Leaves of the Banyan Tree, his epic saga of Western Samoan life, is considered a classic of Pacific literature. It won the 1980 New Zealand Wattie Book of the Year Award.

Wendt was born in Apia, Samoa, in 1939, and first came to New Zealand to study at 13 on a Government scholarship.