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EUI Haiku Competition Winners 2021

Many wonderful Haiku were sent in to this competition. Thank you to everyone who participated.

It was truly difficult to choose a winner, but after much deliberation by our wonderful panel of judges, here they are! Each topic has a winning Haiku, as well as a runner up. 

You can read the winners' names here, as well as the winning poems. 

Then sit down with a cup of tea and read all the other wonderful EUI Haiku written by your friends and colleagues.

 
Note to the poets: we have only published the names of those who gave us explicit permission. If you recognise your haiku and wish your name to be attached to it, contact [email protected].
 

And the winners are...!

The Year 2020

First Place: Adam James Humphreys

Runner up: Anonymous

Life in Italy

First Place: Xiaoman Lin 

Runner up: Anonymous 

Your EUI experience

First place: Alvaro Pereira

Runners up: Pauli Aro & Joe Ganderson

Your research

First place: Pauli Aro

Runner up: Elizabeth Banks 

World affairs

First place: Adrien Bradley

Runner up: Anonymous 

The winning Haiku

 


The Year 2020

Lines in shifting sands,

Frozen minds take to timelines,

Deadlines are dead lines.

Adam James Humphreys

Life in Italy

How to be lively

Growing to be a stone pine

Squirrel will visit

Xiaoman Lin

Your EUI experience

Afternoon sunlight

Macchiato's cannella foam

Books cannot see masks

Alvaro Pereira

Your research

sure, I would work - but

the dog under the table

pokes me with its nose

Pauli Aro

World affairs

emptied streets and squares

screens. over the horizon,

fires on the plain

Adrien Bradley

Runners up

The Year 2020

Man enters building

Dreaming of autumn forests

Sanitizes hands

Anonymous

Life in Italy

Colors fill the air.

Tall oaks grow out of the ground,

Like earth's long brown hair.

Anonymous

World affairs

Invisible walls

Divide us like animals

Hunting each other

Anonymous

 

Your EUI experience

Look up that hill now!

These days it could be a while

Before you come back

Pauli Aro

A calling, back then

To the thousand mind hillside

To read, write, love, breathe

Joe Ganderson

 

Your research

shrimp swim, boats fish, deep.

on Wall Street, a man eats prawns.

money flows back East

Elizabeth Banks

 

Special Mention

One other Haiku deserved a special mention, because its author resurrected a language from the dead, introducing a new art form to Ancient Rome.  

The Year 2020

porta clausa. sic

tempus immobile per

epidemiam.

 

[Like a closed door. Thus

is time immobile during

the epidemic]

Anonymous

 

The process of choosing the winning Haiku 

Your Haiku were judged by a jury of five people from across the EUI community:

  • Juho Harkonen, Professor, SPS
  • Cristina Lafuente Martinez, Max Weber Fellow, ECO
  • Nikita Divissenko, PhD researcher LAW
  • Ana Maria Spariosu, PhD researcher, HEC
  • Federica Signoriello, staff member, Library

All the Haiku were rendered anonymous by two members of the Haiku Organising Committee (Svitlana Lebedenko, Takuya Onoda, Nicola Hargreaves) before being sent to the jury. The third member of the committee only saw the Haiku after they had been made anonymous.

Each member of the jury read all of the anonymous Haiku, and ranked them within their category. They then met, together with the third member of the committee, to discuss, debate, and deliberate the Haiku they believed met the criteria of beauty and perceived authenticity. 

Page last updated on 18 February 2021