haikuspirit

seashores HAIKU FESTIVAL DAY

SATURDAY 11 JULY 2026

at Dylan Hotel Dublin

PROGRAMME

@ MEETING POINT

advised by email to attendees after registration

1100-1215

Guided Haiku Walk & Talk

For all levels, from those who want to learn

about haiku to those who write haiku, led by Gilles Fabre,

founder of seashores, an international journal to share the spirit of haiku

LUNCH (not included)

@ the LIBRARY ROOM

1345-1430

Japan – The Road to the Deep North

First screening in Ireland of Kenneth White’s journey

through Japan on the footsteps of Matsuo Bashō

1445-1530

Discussion on Haiku, Nature and Poetry

with poets Amanda Bell, Jane Robinson, Mark Roper and Gilles Fabre (Facilitator)

(see biographies below)

1600-1730

seashores Haiku Workshop

And other haiku activities throughout the day

@ the TERRACE

1830-1930

Haiku Reading and Haiku Books Sale

Free and Open to all (Registration is required)

€20

Limited Places Available – Book early

If you want to attend this event, please send an email to

seashoreshaiku@gmail.com

and you will receive more information about the registration and other details (meeting point, lunch arrangements, reading and book sales…)

Biographies

Amanda Bell is an award-winning poet, writer and editor. Her publications include Riptide and First the Feathers (poetry collections from Doire Press, 2021 and 2017); The Lost Library Book, the true story of an ancient book missing from Marsh’s Library (Onslaught Press, 2017); Winter Heliotrope, a collaboration with Donald Teskey RHA (Fine Press Poetry, 2023), and Revolution, a haiku collection (wildflower poetry press, 2022). She transcreated Gabriel Rosenstock’s book-length sequence Sasquatch into English (The Loneliness of the Sasquatch, Alba Publishing, 2018). Her collection Undercurrents (Alba Publishing, 2017) won second place in the Kanterman Merit Book Award and was shortlisted for the Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. A section of it, featuring the River Poddle, has been used as a sound walk by Dublin City Council’s Biodiversity Artist in Residence, Rosie O’Reilly, and is available on the ‘Dublin City Trails App’. Amanda’s work has been broadcast on Sunday Miscellany, Lyric Notes, Keywords, and podcasts for the Royal Irish Academy’s podcaster in residence Zoe Comyns. Her essay ‘Urban Foraging’ in Empty House: Poetry and Prose on the Climate Crisis was referred to by Eamon Wall as ‘a landmark essay’ in the Irish Literary Supplement. A novel and poetry collection are forthcoming in 2027.

Jane Robinson’s collections, Island and Atoll (Salmon, 2023) and Journey to the Sleeping Whale (Salmon, 2018), as well as other poems and essays, reflect her ecological awareness. With a doctorate in Biology from Caltech, Jane is also a recipient of the Shine-Strong and Red Line Book Festival Poetry Awards, and of the Strokestown International Poetry Prize. Several of her poems have been set to music: Music for the Atoll. Some more recent work is published in The Stinging Fly, Cold Mountain Review and The Irish Times.

Mark Roper’s most recent poetry collection, Beyond Stillness, came out in October 2022. Bindweed, (Dedalus Press, 2017), was shortlisted for The Irish Times Poetry Now Award. A Gather of Shadow (2012) was also shortlisted for that Award and won the Michael Hartnett Award in 2014. With photographer Paddy Dwan, he has published The River Book, The Backstrand, Comeragh and Sea and Stone, books of image and text about the natural history of County Waterford. A book of short poems, From The Japanese Gardens, with images by the photographer Margaret O’Brien-Moran, was published in early 2025.

Gilles Fabre is a French national, living in Ireland. His haiku have won awards and been published in various journals and anthologies in Ireland, Great Britain, Australia, India, Japan, the USA and Canada (in English), and France and Canada (in French). He has also been published in Japanese and Portuguese. For Gilles, the way and practice of haiku, bringing us closer, and sometimes taking us back, to the source, with its power to connect us to nature and reality, has a role to play in poetry and in our life in general. This is why Gilles founded, in 2018, seashores, an international journal to share the spirit of haiku and its French-speaking counterpart l’estran, in 2023.

Because of a seagull. The Fishing Cat Press, Dublin, 2005.

along the way, a search for the spirit of the world. Alba Publishing, UK, 2020. Selected by The Haiku Foundation for the Touchstone Award Short List.

Editor and publisher with The Fishing Cat Press, in 2021, of EYES WIDE OPEN on the haiku path, Kenneth White’s first book on haiku in the English language, with 8 essays on haiku previously unpublished in English, and a selection of his haiku.

early morning firefly (an adaptation and translation of the Japanese saijiki). The Fishing Cat Press, Dublin, 2024.

Chief editor with Jean Antonini of DOUBLE HORIZON, an international and bilingual haiku anthology. The Fishing Cat Press/AFH, 2025.