Professor Christopher (Kit) Kelen FRSN (born 17 December 1958 in Sydney) is an Australian academic, writer, and artist. He is the younger son of Hungarian-born writer Stephen Kelen.

Kelen is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry and two novels. He has been published widely since the mid-1970s and in 1988 won an ABA/ABC bicentennial award with his poem "Views from Pinchgut".^[1]

In 1992, "The Naming of the Harbour and the Trees" won an Anne Elder Award.^[2] Kelen was Writer-in-Residence for the Australia Council at the B. R. Whiting Library in Rome in 1996.^[2]

For many years, Kelen taught Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Macau.^[3] As of 2018, he lived mainly on Worimi country on the NSW north coast.^[4]

Kelen has published several book-length scholarly works about poetry, including Poetry, Consciousness and Community (2009), City of Poets (2009), Anthem Quality (2014) and Children, Animals and Poetry - Poetics and Ethics of Anthropomorphism (2022).

Kelen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 2019.^[5]

Bibliography

Poetry

• The Naming of the Harbour and the Trees (1992)
• Green Lizard Manifesto (1997)
• Möbius (1998)
• Republics (2000)
• New Territories (2003)
• Eight Days in Lhasa (2006)
• A Map of the Seasons (2006)
• Dredging the Delta (2007)
• After Meng Jiao (2008)
• China Years (2011)
• Pictures of Nothing at All (2014)
• Scavengers' Season (2014)
• As to the Ladders of Whichway (2015)
• A Pocket Kit (2) (2015)
• Poor Man's Coat (2018)
• Book of Mother (2022)
• Bung Mazes (2022)

Novels

• Punk's Travels (1980)
• A Wager with the Gods (2006)

References