Albert Tuaopepe Wendt ONZ CNZM (born 27 October 1939) is a Samoan poet and writer who lives in New Zealand. He is one of the most influential writers in Oceania. His notable works include Sons for the Return Home, published in 1973 (adapted into a feature film in 1979), and Leaves of the Banyan Tree, published in 1979. As an academic he has taught at universities in Samoa, Fiji, Hawaii and New Zealand, and from 1988 to 2008 was the professor of New Zealand literature at the University of Auckland.

Wendt is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including twice receiving the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Asia-Pacific region, multiple top awards at the New Zealand Book Awards, the 2012 Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction and an Icon Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand in 2018. In 2013 he was appointed a member of the Order of New Zealand, New Zealand's highest civilian honour, recognising his pivotal role in the formation of Pacific literature in English.

Wendt was born in Apia, Western Samoa (now known as Samoa) in 1939, and lived in Samoa as a child. He was one of nine children, and his father was a plumber. He is of German heritage through his great-grandfather on his father's side, but in 2002 said he considered his family heritage to be "totally Samoan". In 1952, Wendt received a scholarship to attend New Plymouth Boys' High School in New Zealand. He graduated in 1957. During his time at the school he had a couple of poems and a short story published in the school's annual magazine, The Taranakian.

He completed a diploma of teaching at Ardmore Teachers' College in 1959, and subsequently attended Victoria University of Wellington, graduating with a Master of Arts in History in 1964. His Master's thesis was about the Mau, Samoa's independence movement from colonialism during the first decade of the 1900s. He began to publish work in literary magazines, including the New Zealand School Journal, the New Zealand Listener, and Landfall while attending Victoria University. In 1963, he received an award from Landfall for the best prose by a writer under the age of 25, for his short story "The Name of the Game". He has said that at the time he started writing, he was inspired by the examples of Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Jacquie Sturm and Hone Tuwhare, who were then the only well-known Polynesian writers in New Zealand.

In 1965 Wendt returned to Samoa and became the headmaster of Samoa College. He continued to send poems and short stories back to New Zealand for publication in magazines, and in 1972 he wrote two plays: Comes the Revolution, performed at the South Pacific Arts Festival, and The Contract, performed at the School's Drama Festival in Apia. He began working on the epic novel Leaves of the Banyan Tree around this time, but due to its length, put it aside and finished the novel Sons for the Return Home first, which was published in 1973. It described the experiences of a young Samoan man in New Zealand, and in 1979 was adapted into a feature film directed by Paul Maunder, which was the first film focusing on the experiences of Pacific people in New Zealand.

In 1974 Wendt was appointed a senior lecturer at the University of the South Pacific, and worked both in Suva and at its Samoan centre. There, he published a number of articles in the literary journal Mana (including works examining the impact of colonialism on Pacific arts and culture) and edited collections of poems from Fiji, Samoa, the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and the Solomon Islands. In 1974 he published a collection of short stories, in the style of modern-day fables, titled Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree. Two stories from the collection were adapted into a feature film of the same name directed by Martyn Sanderson in 1989. His first poetry collection, Inside Us the Dead: Poems 1961 to 1974, was published in 1976, and a novella, Pouliuli (translated as "darkness"), was published in 1977.

Wendt's epic family saga Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979) won first place at the 1980 Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards. In 1980 he was the editor of Lali, an anthology of Pacific writing. From 1982 to 1987 he was the professor of Pacific literature at the University of the South Pacific, and was also appointed to the position of pro-vice-chancellor.

In 1988 he was appointed as the first professor of New Zealand literature at the University of Auckland. He was the first Pacific Islander to be appointed as an English professor at the university. In his later career he edited important anthologies of Pacific writing including Nuanua (1995), Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (2003) (with Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan) and Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English – Whetu Moana II (2010) (with Whaitiri and Sullivan). Whetu Moana was awarded the Montana Award for Reference and Anthology at the 2004 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and was the first anthology of modern Polynesian poetry in English to have Polynesian editors. Its successor Mauri Ora was a finalist in the Poetry category at the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards.