The Pacific

Literature in the Pacific ranges from storytelling to epic poetry and genealogies, oratory, songs, and drama. Literacy, introduced by missionaries in the Nineteenth Century, spread fairly quickly and many South Pacific languages were soon written.

In 1960, perhaps the first novel by South Pacific Island writers was published, Makutu, by the Cook Islanders Tom and Lydia Davis. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the first works of a number of writers: short stories by Fiji’s Raymond Pillai and Subramani and Tonga’s Epeli Hau’ofa; poems by Konai Helu Thaman, of Tonga, and Fiji’s Pio Manoa (who also often writes in Fijian); and short stories, poems and, in 1973, the novel Sons for the Return Home, by the Samoan Albert Wendt, of all South Pacific writers perhaps the best known outside the region.

But it was the establishment of the two regional universities, the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) in 1966 and the University of the South Pacific (USP) in 1968, which provided a focus and a forum for writers and other artists and encouraged the development and publication of creative writing, through courses, workshops, regional conferences and the establishment of literary journals.

http://www.vanuatu.usp.ac.fj/paclangunit/English_South_Pacific.htm