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 for his novel The Adventures of Vela. “It is a great honour to be recognised in this way” said Professor Wendt at the Awards Ceremony in Sydney last week. “Vela has been a character I have thought about for a long time so this is a lifetime’s work”. Wendt won ahead of several prominent finalists including J. M. Coetzee (Australia and Nobel Prize Winner), Peter Carey (Australia) and Thomas Keneally (Australia). The Adventures of Vela now goes 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 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. 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 is also one of the Starmap champions.
(story adapted from the Booksellers website)
