Dr. A. Robert Lee has announced the winner of the sixth IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award at The Asian Conference on Literature, Librarianship & Archival Science 2016 in Kobe, Japan

The Grand Prize winner of the sixth IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award has been named as Suraja Roychowdhury of the United States for the following submission:

sunny afternoon
a shadow
on the mammogram
Suraja Roychowdhury, United States

Co-Founder and Judge, His Excellency Dr. Drago Štambuk, hand-selected the winner anonymously and with great care, along with a number of runners-up. The winner was announced by fellow poet, Dr. A. Robert Lee, on Friday, April 8, 2016 at The Asian Conference on Literature, Librarianship & Archival Science (LibrAsia2016).

The entry was also also the 1st Choice of Guest Judge, Alan Summers, of the United Kingdom, who made a special guest selection on the conference theme of “Justice”. It is testament to the strength of Suraja Roychowdhury’s winning haiku that it was selected independently and anonymously for both sections of the award’s judging.

This year the award attracted a record 680 submissions from poets representing a total of 60 countries, which exemplifies the growing and increasingly global appeal of both the poetry form and the award.

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 LibrAsia2016 Plenary 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.

A full list of Commended and Runners Up is available to read here.


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.