Hadaa Sendoo

Roots

Hadaa Sendoo was born in 1961 in Southern Mongolia, today's Inner Mongolia,and grew up in Shiiliigool. His father was the head of a theatre and his mother was a drama actor. Sendoo has lived in Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia, since 1991.

Early years

When Hadaa Sendoo was very young, his father moved his family to Southern Mongolia, near the Dalan Har Mountains, where Hadaa spent his childhood. He studied old Mongolian and also Chinese at the local high school, but tired of the school curriculum, he later returned to the steppe for a nomadic life until 1984, when his father recommended that he should enter an art institute, where he soon served as an editorial assistant. The young Hadaa has had the opportunity to read a lot of Mongolian literature - certainly the classics, and thus epics, including the Jangar, Books of Mongolian Folk Songs, and also Modernist Poetry (Shuleg). In 1989, he published his first collection of poems The Nomadic Songs and Moonlight. In 1991, he moved to Northern Mongolia and ever since has lived in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, where he teaches at the university as a professor of literature, and is doing research in Mongolian folk literature, including folk songs, and in Mongolian mythology. In 1996, Hadaa Sendoo published his first collection of poems written in Cyrillic new Mongolian. In 1998, he formally joined the Mongolian Writers Union. In 1999, Hadaa and his friends co-founded a cultural magazine called The World's Mongolians (a Mongolian - English bilingual edition) that is published in Mongolia. In the summer of the same year, Hadaa and his bosom friend S. Tserendorj, who is also a Mongolian poet, organized the first Asian Poetry Festival in Ulaanbaatar. Hadaa has won the Athens City Hall Prize and the 2nd Olympics of Culture Prize (Athens,1999). He has taught at the National University of Mongolia.

On the way to poetry

In his middle age, Hadaa Sendoo wrote many poems, and his poetic style was very different from that of the past.

Hadaa Sendoo received many poetry awards,

On September 24, 2011, Hadaa joined the World Poetry Movement and thus became one of its earliest member who were founding the World Poetry Movement.

In 2012, Hadaa Sendoo was invited to the largest poetry festival ever staged in the UK, the Southbank Centre's Poetry Parnassus, where he read his poetry and discussed his work as part of the festival. His latest collection of poems was displayed as part of the exhibition in the outdoor spaces around the Royal Festival Hall and the Queen Elizabeth Hall. One of his poems was printed on bookmarks for the "Rain of Poems", and thus was among the poems dropped from a helicopter over London. His poems have appeared in the World Record Anthology by Bloodaxe. And also in an Anthology of Present Day Best Poems of 60 representative poets around the globe.

Poets talking about poetry of Hadaa Sendoo

Cambridge University Professor and Poet Richard Berengarten wrote about one of Hadaa Sendoo's works: "I have read this book through carefully. More important, I was delighted to discover the depth and breadth of his great vision. This impression of mine was strengthened when I read the last prose text on the "Poet of the 21st century" in the bool Come Back to Earth, and his poem "The Wind". Both these texts connect with my concept of the "universalist poet" and "universalist poetry". The theme of the wind (air, breath, spirit) is a very profound one. The poems in Come Back to Earth gave me a sense of the wide spaces of Mongolia and also made me sad for the culture that has been lost. They reminded me of the fine movies The Cave of the Yellow Dog and Story of the Weeping Camel. "

Germany's Andreas Weiland, a poet and art critic, said: "Hadaa Sendoo's poetry echoes his life, nature, the wide land, the wind of Mongolia. I try to listen to the rhythm. I pay attention to the poetic quality of each line. I think that lines in his poetry like "resigned to another death" or "glad to die another death" both refer to reincarnation. We die so many deaths, because we are reborn, according to Shamanist and Buddhist (and other) beliefs. His poems touch my heart and evoke thoughts and strong emotions, intense images. I think highly of Hadaa Sendoo as a sensitive and real poet".

Influence exerted

He was invited to the influential International Poetry Festival of Medellin as a guest, and also to the 2011 Tokyo Poetry Festival. In 2012, he took part in the UK's largest ever poetry festival Poetry Parnassus [7].

A far-reaching poetry event occurred in October 2006 when a groundbreaking and unprecedented international poetry yearbook appeared in Central Asia; founder Hadaa Sendoo deserved to become the leading figure of this World Poetry Almanac published in Mongolia [8].

In 2016, Hadaa Sendoo published his collection of poems Sweet Smell of Grass (بوی شیرین چمن)[9] in Persian, causing great attention. This collection of poems has been featured and discussed in the internationally renowned Tehran International Book Fair.

In 2017, as a poet from Asia, Hadaa Sendoo received the award at the Festival DOOS-2017 for "The Manifesto of the five continents”, in Moscow, Russia.

Awards

Works