Novelist, poet, short story writer, playwright and painter, Maualaivao Albert Wendt CNZM is Emeritus Professor of English at The University of Auckland.
An influential figure in the development of Pacific literature since the 1970s, he was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2001 and won the Commonwealth Writer’s Asia Pacific Region Prize in 2010.
His co-edited anthology Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English was shortlisted for the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards.