The British Haiku Society Awards

The British Haiku Society has currently 3 different awards in its gift:

  1. The British Haiku Awards

The British Haiku Awards are open to the general public worldwide and made annually, with money prizes donated by the Society. There are separate awards for haiku, haibun and tanka. Awards under this name have been made since 2010 but began as the James W. Hackett Award (est. in 1991). James W. Hackett judged the awards with another judge nominated by the BHS up to and including 2009. Initially these awards were funded partly from sales of James W. Hackett's Zen Haiku and Other Zen Poems, for which the author appointed BHS as his UK and Eurozone agents.

  1. The Museum of Haiku Literature Awards

Awardees are drawn from the contributors to the Society's journal, Blithe Spirit. The winner from one issue becomes the judge for the next issue with a different judge for each quarter. The awards of £50 are funded by an annual gift from the Museum in Tokyo, whose generosity commenced in 1992.

  1. The Haibungaku Awards

The Haibungaku Awards are open to submissions from members and the general public worldwide. Authors of works of a seminal and scholarly calibre are eligible to apply at any time. The purpose of these occasional (and it must be understood, rare) awards is to publish single works, under the imprint of the British Haiku Society, which are judged to add significantly to our theoretical understanding and/or practice of English language haiku and/or haibun. For each application it receives the Society will appoint an appropriate jury. The Awards were instituted in 2003 at the wish of Sakaguchi Hidetaka and Sakaguchi Akiko (members of BHS) who donated the foundation sum of £ 2,300. The first publication, Stepping Stones (2007), and the second, A Silver Tapestry (2015) are available through the Society’s bookshop. The Society expects to recoup the costs of publication so as to replenish the fund.

A fourth award, the Sasakawa Prize for Innovations in the Field of Haiku/ Haibun, was funded in the 1990s until 2004 by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, based in London, but is now defunct. Awards of £2,500 were made by Sasakawa on condition that the awardee should use the prize to travel to Japan and disseminate his/her ideas there.