Awards & Contests

The annual Betty Drevniok Award was established in 1998, in memory of Betty Drevniok, who served as secretary of the society from 1977 to 1979 and president from 1979 to 1982.

The original BHS awards were established for haiku by and named in honor of American poet James W. Hackett, who underwrote the activity through royalties from his book sales and made the final choice of haiku. Contest results, together with judges’ commentary by J.W. Hackett, were published in the BHS newsletter and journal Blithe Spirit in the year following the contest. In 2010 the Hackett Awards were joined with the Society’s Tanka Awards and Haibun Anthology Awards and together renamed the British Haiku Society Awards. The haiku section of the competition was renamed in honor of David Cobb in 2020.

The Clement Hoyt Memorial Award was one of the early and most distinguished of the designations of excellence in haiku awarded by Modern Haiku. Begun under the editorship of Kay Titus Mormino, the award was first granted in the summer 1971 issue and ran through the summer of 1981, that is, into the editorship of Robert Spiess. The prize was named in honor of Clement Hoyt and underwritten by his widow, Violet Hoyt. Initially the award brought a cash prize of $5.00 but from 1977 onward was replaced by a volume of Hoyt’s collected haikai.

The European Quarterly Kukai, an online kukai, was inaugurated in March 2013, the project of Polish haiku poets Krzysztof Kokot and Robert Kania. Until 2018 each of the quarterly kukai was keyed to one of the four seasons, then the competitions were made annual and renamed the European Kukai. In its later years the kukai attracted as many as 260 entries from poets in up to 50 countries. The kukai ran for 25 editions, last posting results in March 2023.

Conceived in 2010, the European Top 100 Haiku Authors is a listing of the most active and creative European haiku poets chosen by Polish poet Krzysztof Kokot and posted on the Web annually since 2011.