Guest Speaker: Steven Edmund Winduo

Posted: Tuesday Oct 24, 2017

Creative Cities Southern Hui is excited to welcome STEVEN EDMUND WINDUO as delegate and guest speaker. Steven will be visiting Dunedin, from Papua New Guinea, for the duration of the Hui, participating in events and speaking at Creative Connections on Thursday 30th November. 

'I think of myself as a rower of the ocean, taking the winds and currents of Oceania, traveling in and out of islands, around islands, carrying with me the burden of our collective experiences, always rowing to get somewhere to link up all our peoples, and teaching our people and others to appreciate our cultures, arts, way of life and knowledge systems.'

Steven Winduo is a writer and scholar from Papua New Guinea. He has read his works in homeland, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Minnesota, Hawaii, and the Philippines.

His first collection of poetry, Lomo’ha I am, in Spirit’s Voice I Call (1991), was published during his MA studies in English at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. This led to the publication of three more collections of poetry: Hembemba: Rivers of the Forest (2000), A Rower’s Song (2009), Detwan How? (2012).

In addition to his scholarly work, Transitions and Transformations: Literature, Politics and Culture in PNG (2013), Steven has also written short stories (The Unpainted Mask), a novel (Land Echoes) and several children’s books.

As part of the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) program, Steven recently participated in the 2017 Melbourne Writers Festival, and was a writer in residence in both the Philippines and Australia.

Steven held the Arthur Lynn Andrews Chair in Pacific and Asian Studies in 2011, within the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawaii. He has been a visiting research scholar at the East West Center, held within the Pacific Islands Development Program (2011). He has served as a visiting professor, for the Department of English at the University of Minnesota (2007-2008) where he previously received his PhD.

Maintaining his connection to New Zealand, Steven was a research scholar with the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Islands Studies, at the University of Canterbury in 2006.

Steven Winduo is currently the Director of the Academic Audit Unit at the University of Papua New Guinea.

Steven’s online blog about the arts, culture and education can be found here.

'Oceania is thousands of years old with a history and culture that is deeper than our intellectual excavations and descriptions. Our deep inner strengths are derived from cultural and social core, which to me is like a yoke so pure and free and as old as the core of an ancient rock that stands against the modernizing currents of the world. These are sources of our learning, creativity, and articulations. There is an unbroken spiritual connection we have as kinsfolk in our belief in our indigenous, arts, culture, and indigenous forms of knowledge, cosmology, and the ocean in us.' 

Creative Connections aims to explore creativity as the touchstone of healthy, sustainable communities and celebrate the power of collaboration to inspire.