The First Bar Sagi Young Poets Prize Awards Event
The awards event for the first Bar Sagi Young Poets Prize competition, which should have been held in mid-2020, was, like much of life, put on hold by the Corona virus. We finally held it as a virtual Zoom event on October 27, 2020, together with the awards event for the 2019 Reuben Rose competition.
But every cloud has a silver lining: many more of us than usually manage to travel to a national event could zoom in, including several members from abroad - over 50 people registered and nearly that many attended the event, mainly of course from Israel but also from the UK, the USA and Canada. We were delighted to have such a good audience for our young poets!
The International Judge of the Reuben Rose competition, Katherine Gordon from Canada, sent a lovely message about the importance of poetry in these fraught times, which applied equally to our young poets and our adult ones: worth reading! To do so, click here.
One highlight of the event was the account by Professor Anthony Joseph, Bar's grandfather, of Bar and her poetry, and the showing of a beautiful videos about her work: a poem of Bar's set to music by Lior Soltz and Tzlil Rubinstein and sung by Tzlil (Echoes of Bar - Journey: viewable on YouTube via this link) To read Professor Joseph's account, click here.
The other highlight was of course hearing the three winning poems, and the sole one which received an Honourable Mention, read by their young poets. To read all four poems, and Liraz Eliszda's account of how she came to write hers, click here (PDF file).
We recorded the event via Zoom - both a full video and an audio-only recording - and both recordings are on the Voices Israel Google Drive; our secretary Linda is sending all members, and of course the young poets, a link to the uploaded files. They are of course too big to upload to this website, but below are a few screenshots to give the feel of the event. Please note that the video file is large and could take several minutes to download.
Screenshots from the Zoom event
The poets reading their poems
The poets reading their poems
