The awards event for the first Bar Sagi Young Poets Prize was, like most of life, put on hold by Covid-19; we finally held it via Zoom on October 27, 2020, together with the awards event for the 2019 Reuben Rose competition.
The highlight of the evening: hearing the three winners, Esther, Chaya and Yaara, and the winner of an Honourable Mention, Liraz, read their poems.
Over 50 people registered and nearly that many zoomed in, 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!
Professor Anthony Joseph, Bar’s grandfather, gave a moving account of Bar and her poetry, and showed 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 highlight of the evening was of course the reading of the three winning poems, and the sole one which received an Honourable Mention, by their young poets. Here are the texts of all four poems, together with Liraz Eliszda’s account of how she came to write hers.
We recorded the event via Zoom – both a full video and an audio-only recording – and uploaded them to the Voices Israel Google Drive, sending the young poets, and our members, a link to the files. Below are a few screenshots to give the feel of the event.
Screenshots from the Zoom event
The poets reading their poems
Voices Israel Group of Poets in English 