The British Haiku Society
LECTURE
The British Haiku Society
The British Haiku Society was founded in 1990. The BHS is pioneering the appreciation and writing of haiku in the UK, and has links also with similar organisations throughout the world. Currently there are around 320 members from all over the world: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and USA.
The British Haiku Society promotes the appreciation and the writing of haiku, haibun, senryu, renku and tanka. We do this by: publishing haiku-related work in our journal, Blithe Spirit, and our regularly published haiku anthologies; organising conferences, tutorials and workshops; assisting teachers in schools and colleges; enabling the advancement of research and the public dissemination of the results of such research; and we also actively develop links with other organisations interested in haiku and related genres.
We are active in promoting the teaching of haiku in schools and colleges, and able to provide readers/course and workshop leaders/speakers for poetry groups, etc. We have also created a haiku teaching/learning kit for schools which could be found in the ‘Teaching Haiku‘ section on our website.
At HYPER JAPAN, the course tutors are:
Iliyana Stoyanova is a poet, editor and translator; holds a PhD in Theology. She is the Living Legacies Editor at the Living Haiku Anthology, Communications Officer and BHS Awards Administrator at the British Haiku Society, Former Secretary of the United Haiku and Tanka Society (2017-2020), Photo Editor in Haikupedia, and also a member of the BHS, Haiku Club-Plovdiv, The London Haiku Group and Tanka Society of America. Her haiku, tanka, haibun and other poems have been included in numerous anthologies and journals and have been translated in Bulgarian, English, Japanese, Croatian, Russian, Italian and other languages. She has received many awards and honours at international competitions.
David Bingham has been writing haiku for over twenty years and is frequently published in leading haiku journals, was the editor of ‘Blithe Spirit’ for two years and is a regular workshop leader in the writing of haiku and related forms in English. He was the winner of the British Haiku Society, Ken and Noragh Jones International Award for Haibun, 2017 and was the editor of ‘Ripening Cherries’ an anthology of haiku, tanka and haibun published by Offa’s Press in October 2019. He also edited the BHS haibun anthology, ‘Stories under Every Rock’ which was published in 2020.
Together, Iliyana and David organised the International Haiku Conference held in St Albans in 2019 and edited the conference anthology, ‘where silence becomes song’.