Christopher (Kit) Kelen is a poet and painter, resident on Worimi lands, in the Myall Lakes of NSW, Australia. Published widely since the seventies, he has more than a dozen full length collections in English as well as translated books of poetry in Chinese (several), Portuguese (several), French, Italian, Spanish, Indonesian, Swedish, Norwegian, Filipino, Greek, Romanian and Esperanto. Kit’s latest volume of poetry in English is Book of Mother, published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2022.
Kit has shortlisted for and won poetry prizes since the eighties (an ABC/Bicentennial Award). His first book The Naming of the Harbour & the Trees won an Anne Elder in the nineties. In 2024 Kit Kelen was the winner of the Newcastle Poetry Prize.
Kit has been writer/artist in Residence in many parts of the world – in Australia, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Iceland, Finland, Romania, the US and Cyprus. A number of these residencies have led to book publications – for instance Bundanon Residencies produced his books Time with the Sky and To the Single Man’s Hut. Time at the Messen residency on the Hardanger Fjord produced Poor Man’s Coat and a book in Norwegian entitled Glasfjorden (the glass fjord).
Kit has had ten solo painting and drawing exhibitions – in Australia, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Macao. Recent exhibitions include Palimpspectre (in 2023, at the Manning Regional Gallery, NSW) and word; unword (2024) at the WORDXIMAGE gallery in Maitland.
Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Macau, where he taught for many years, Kit Kelen is also a Conjoint Professor at the University of Newcastle and a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW. In 2017 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Malmö, in Sweden.
Series Editor for Flying Islands Pocket Poets Series (with now more than one hundred volumes), Kit has mentored many poets and translators from various parts of the world, and conducted a number of on-line communities of practice in poetry (most notably Project 366 [from 2016-2020]). He currently runs Flying Islands’ yearlong on-line poetry manuscript workshop. You can follow Kit’s work-in-progress at the Daily Kit – https://thedailykitkelen.blogspot.com/
Hear Kit at the Festival during guest poet sessions on