Danny Blackwell (born February 6, 1977, Margate, UK). British musician, poet, editor, translator, guide, teacher. He edited the re:Virals feature for the Haiku Foundation from 2017 to 2019. Editor of Haiku from Iberia and Beyond: an anthology of haiku written in the languages of the Iberian Peninsula (2018). Author of the Haikupedia articles on haiku in Catalan, the Basque country, and Galicia. Resides in Valencia, Spain.

The Basque Country is an autonomous community that was granted nationality status within Spain in 1978. The term “Basque Country” also refers to the Basque language and cultural community that comprises parts of southwestern France as well as northwestern Spain. Euskera, the pre-Indo-European Basque language, is a language isolate, that is, it is unrelated to any other language in the world. In 2016 Basque had 751,500 active speakers. Juan Kruz Igerabide was the first to produce a book of haiku in Basque, Sarean leiho (Window in the Net; 1994).

Catalonia (written as Catalunya in the Catalan language, and as Cataluña in the Spanish language) is an autonomous community in the northeastern part of Spain. The official languages are Catalan, Spanish, and the Aranese dialect of Occitan. The Catalan language is spoken in northeastern Spain and the Balearic Islands as well as the principality of Andorra. First contacts with haiku in Catalonia were made through the publication of translations from English of the imagist poets in 1920 and from French of parts of Paul-Louis Couchoud’s work the following year. In the early 1920s a number of established poets began to experiment with haiku-like verses, but the first true haiku in Catalan was probably written by Josep María Junoy. Today there are a number of poets writing and publishing their work in Catalan but such events as Catalan haiku anthologies and organizations are just beginning.

In Galicia, an autonomous community in the northwest of Spain, approximately 2.4 million people speak Galician, a Romance language linked to Portuguese. A few attempts have been made to draw parallels between Japanese haiku and medieval Galician-Portuguese poetry (lírica galaico-portuguesa), notably by Stephen Reckert in Más allá de las neblinas de noviembre (2001) and Luís Alonso Girgado’s introduction to the first edition of Ricardo Martinez-Conde’s A núa lentitude (2001).