Published widely since the seventies, Kelen has a dozen full length collections in English as well as translated books of poetry in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, Indonesian, Swedish, Norwegian, Filipino and Greek. His latest volume of poetry in English is Book of Mother, published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2022. Also published this year is his bilingual (Greek and English) volume a postcard from the fires, a picture of the rains, published by Kaleidoscope in Athens.
In 2017, Kelen was shortlisted twice for the Montreal Poetry Prize and won the Local Award in the Newcastle Poetry Prize. In 2019 and 2020 Kelen won the Hunter Writers’ Centre award in the NPP. He was also shortlisted for the ACU prize in 2020. In 2021 he won the bronze medal in the Newcastle Poetry Prize. 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. In 2017, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Malmo, in Sweden. Literary editor for Postcolonial Text and Series Editor for Flying Islands Pocket Poets Series, Kelen has mentored many poets and translators from various parts of the world, and run a number of on-line communities of practice in poetry (most notably Project 366 [from 2016-2020]). Kelen is a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW.
