The winner of the fifth IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award is announced by Dr. A. Robert Lee

The winner of the fifth IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award has been named as Boris Nazansky of Croatia for the following submission:

pregnancy
shape of the dark side
of the crescent moon
Boris Nazansky, Croatia

This year the award attracted a record 400 submissions from poets representing a total of 54 countries. Consistently throughout the five years of its running, the award has received much support and a large percentage of entries from Croatia. It is also the home country of founder and judge Dr. Drago Štambuk as well as of that of Vladimir Devidé himself, so it is therefore with great pleasure that we award one of their fellow countrymen.

Dr. Štambuk hand-selected the winner with great care, along with a number of runners-up. The winner was announced by fellow poet Dr. A. Robert Lee on Friday April 3, 2015 at The Fifth Asian Conference on Literature and Librarianship (LibrAsia2015).

LibrAsia 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 great poet and LibrAsia2015 Keynote Speaker, Dr. A. Robert Lee, who announced the winning entries. Thanks also goes to the Haiku International Association for their continued support of the event, particularly its President, Dr. Akito Arima, as well as Hana Fujimoto and Emiko Miyashita, both members of the Haiku International Association Board of Councillors.

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.

Read more about the award here.