Kit Kelen

Christopher (Kit) Kelen (客遠文) is a well known Australian scholar and poet whose literary works have been widely published and broadcast since the mid seventies. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature describes Kelen’s work as ‘typically innovative and intellectually sharp’. Kelen holds degrees in literature and linguistics from the University of Sydney and two doctorates from the University of Western Sydney – a PhD in the area of poetics and an EdD in Critical Pedagogy of Creative Writing. Kelen’s first volume of poetry The Naming of the Harbour and the Trees won an Anne Elder Award in 1992. In 1996 Kelen was Writer-in-Residence for the Australia Council at the B.R.Whiting Library in Rome. In 1999 he won the Blundstone National Essay Contest, conducted by Island journal. He also won second prize in the Gwen Harwood Poetry Award that year. In 2000 Kelen’s poetry/art collaboration (with Carol Archer) Tai Mo Shan/Big Hat Mountain was exhibited at the Montblanc Gallery in Hong Kong’s Fringe Club. And in 2001 another collaboration (essay and watercolour) titled Shui Yi Meng/Sleep to Dream was shown at the Montblanc Gallery. Both exhibitions were published as full colour catalogues. Kelen’s fourth book of poems, Republics, dealing with the ethics of identity in millennial Australia, was published by Five Islands Press in Australia in 2000. A fifth volume, New Territories – a pilgrimage through Hong Kong, structured after Danté’s Divine Comedy – was published with the aid of the Hong Kong Arts Development Board in 2003. In 2004 Kelen’s chapbook Wyoming Suite – a North American sojurn – was released by VAC Publishing in Chicago. In 2005, Kelen’s long poem ‘Macao’ was shortlisted for the prestigious Newcastle Poetry Prize and a re-edited version of Tai Mo Shan appeared in Southerly. In 2007, Kelen edited a feature entitled ‘Poetry of Response’ which appears in Jacket magazine. Also in 2007, Kelen was winner of Westerly’s Patricia Hackett Prize. The most recent of Kelen’s ten volumes of poetry are After Meng Jiao: Responses to the Tang Poet, published in 2008 by VAC (Chicago, IL) and God preserve me from those who want what’s best for me, published in 2009 by Picaro Press, (N.S.W, Australia). In 2009 Kelen was shortlisted for the PressPress Poetry Chapbook Award and his volume of poems the whole forest dancing is forthcoming from PressPress in English, Chinese and Portuguese editions. Apart from poetry Kelen publishes in a range of theoretical areas including writing pedagogy, ethics, rhetoric, cultural and literary studies and various intersections of these. In December of 2006 Kelen had an exhibition at Creative Macau (Macau Cultural Centre) titled: Bridges and Boats. The catalogue for this exhibition was CCI’s 2007 calendar. Kelen is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Macau, where he has taught Literature and Creative Writing since 2000. Kelen is the editor of the on-line journal Poetry Macao and poetry editor for the monthly lifestyle/current affairs journal Macao Closer.