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 and 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/
excerpt:
boil him into soup and broth
Peer Gynt in Grieg’s ‘Hall of the Mountain King’
‘to thyself be enough’, says the Great Troll
here they come
earthquake boarding school rumble
bad teeth goblins, trolls and gnomes
and the king has a daughter
heavy on the hoof
at a temperature where no one would wash
a kind of creeping up after
what they gain in volume they lack in manners
they’ve got rhythm, they’re unstoppable
if they’re not your children, then whose?
they’re tearing through a mountain in Norway
bright fairy lights should keep you awake in the middle
but it won’t work
they whistle this tune when it’s murder
Inspector Gadget, Sonic the Hedgehog
the Union sneaks up on Atlanta
go round
and sinless so
come to a twitchy tumult
great cymbal clash at the end of time
of course it was a dream
