Winner announced: The IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award 2013

The third IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award is revealed by Professor Mark Williams

Krzysztof Kokot of Poland has been announced as the winner of the third IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award for the following submission:

knock on the door –
from this and other side
question marks
Krzysztof Kokot, Poland

The award attracted haikus of a consistently high standard from poets representing a total of 30 countries. Most submissions arrived from Croatia, but USA, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Romania and Serbia were also heavily represented. Founder and judge Dr. Drago Štambuk hand-selected the winner with great care, along with a number of runners-up. The winner was announced by Professor Mark Williams of the University of Leeds, UK and formerly of Akita International University, Japan on Thursday, April 4, 2013 at The Third Asian Conference on Literature and Librarianship (LibrAsia2013).

The IAFOR Asian Conference on Literature and Librarianship is an international and interdisciplinary conference which brings together academics and practitioners from across the world to discuss new directions of research and discovery in literature and librarianship. It is the proud annual host of the IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award Ceremony. As well as the award ceremony, the conference played host to Emiko Miyashita and Hana Fujimoto of the Haiku International Association who gave a creative haiku writing workshop.

Thanks goes to the many poets and other lovers of haiku who supported the award and haiku reading event, including Akito Arima, President of the Haiku International Association, Hana Fujimoto, the organisation’s Secretary, and poet and translator, Emiko Miyashita. Special thanks also goes to Ban’yan Natsuishi, President of the World Haiku Association for his help in promoting the award and to Professor Mark Williams for delivering his Keynote Address at LibrAsia2013, as well as announcing the results of the 2013 Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award.

ABOUT THE AWARD

The IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award was formed when Dr. Drago Štambuk suggested that The International Academic Forum consider launching a haiku award in memory of Vladimir Devidé.

It didn’t take much convincing. IAFOR is dedicated to the promotion of international, intercultural and interdisciplinary research, dialogue, and understanding, and Vladimir Devidé would have identified strongly with this mission, for in many ways it was also his own. He was a mathematician, a Japanologist, a translator, and a poet, who through haiku accessed another culture and built bridges between Croatia and Japan, and within Japan. After his death, those bridges continue to develop between exponents of classical and modern haiku, as the award recognises excellence regardless of whether submitted haiku are in the traditional or more modern style.