Christopher Kelen

Christopher "Kit" Kelen (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] In 2024, he won the Newcastle Poetry Prize.