Japanese Literary Awards

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Hagiwara Sakutaro Award はぎわらさくたろうしょう

Edition 32 (2024)

Modern poetry

Winners

6 people
Tahi Saihate さいはて たひ award

A poetry collection that captures the emotional turbulence where love and misunderstanding overlap, using sharp leaps of language. It avoids sweetness and instead quietly illuminates solitude and bodily warmth.

If you can feel loved, the heart seems to wear light. Tahi Saihate’s twelfth poetry collection.

96 pages
lovesolitudewarmthlinguistic leapcontemporary poetry
Kōtarō Iizawa いいざわ こうたろう nominee

A third poetry collection arranged in three parts, moving between travel, memory, landscape, and fantasy. Seals, Ukraine, and traces of Africa intersect as vision and feeling are slowly rewoven.

The grief of the seals drifts through the icy sea.

158 pages
travelmemorylandscapesealswar and loss
Kyoko Nogi のぎ きょうこ nominee

A poetry collection that gathers fragments of dreams and daily life and raises language from an ambiguous estuary-like space. It looks quietly at the texture of loss and the light that still remains.

It follows the moonlight that once fell into the water, writing onward as if to gather it back.

120 pages
lossmemorydreamsmoonquietness
Takako Arai あらい たかこ nominee

A poetry collection that brings land memory and bodily sensation to the surface through language shaped by Tohoku dialect. The boundary between humans and animals wavers, leaving a deep acoustic resonance.

A sound deeper than voice: aren’t living things carrying it within them?

132 pages
Tohoku dialectmemorybodily sensationliving beingsvoices of place
Tachibana Shinobu たちばな しのぶ nominee

A poetry collection built around the image of a cat, layering poems with a transparent and uncanny texture. Ordinary scenes gradually slip out of place, opening into a daydream-like atmosphere.

After three days, the cat that had absorbed water became plump and transparent.

104 pages
catstransparencyslippage of the ordinarydaydreamlife and death
河野俊一 こうの しゅんいち nominee

A poetry collection that looks at family illness and loss while crystallizing changes in the body and in time. Medical memory and private pain overlap within a quiet, steady voice.

It gathers the texture of conversation and the time that drifts through the hospital room.

112 pages
illness and familybodylossmemoryquiet narration