Quote by Albert Wendt: “Story is breath. Without it, the people die.”

Stories are not entertainment — they are the medium through which a people understand who they are, where they come from, and how to live. When stories are lost, through colonisation, cultural suppression, or forgetting, a community loses the thing that gives it life. Oral tradition is survival.

Wendt continued writing and teaching into the 2010s as Pacific literature faced pressures from globalisation and digital culture. Languages and oral traditions across the Pacific were threatened as younger generations moved to cities and anglophone cultures. Pacific literary scholars were urgently documenting and revitalising indigenous storytelling traditions.

Samoan novelist, poet, and academic considered one of the founders of modern Pacific literature. His 1973 novel Sons for the Return Home was a landmark in Pacific fiction. He has taught at the University of Auckland and the University of Hawaiʻi and has championed indigenous Pacific artistic expression throughout his career.