Christopher Kelen

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Christopher (Kit) Kelen (1958-), born Sydney, is an Australian writer and artist currently resident in Macao, China. Kelen is the author of eight volumes of poetry and two novels, as follows. 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). Fiction: Punk’s Travels (1980), A Wager with the Gods (2006). Published widely since the mid nineteen seventies, in 1988 Kelen won an ABA/ABC bicentennial award with his poem ‘Views from Pinchgut’. In 1992 The Naming of the Harbour and the Trees won an Anne Elder Award. Kelen was Writer-in-Residence for the Australia Council at the B.R.Whiting Library in Rome in 1996. In 1999 he won the Blundstone National Essay Contest, conducted by Island journal. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature describes Kelen’s work as ‘typically innovative and intellectually sharp’. Kelen currently teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Macau in South China.