Christopher Kelen

Christopher "Kit" Kelen (born 17 December 1958 in Sydney) is an Australian academic, writer, and artist. He is the younger son of Hungarian-born writer Stephen Kelen.

Kelen is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry and two novels. He has been published widely since the mid-1970s and in 1988 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. As of 2018, he lived mainly on Worimi country on the NSW north coast.

Kelen has published several book-length scholarly works about poetry, including Poetry, Consciousness and Community (2009), City of Poets (2009), Anthem Quality (2014) and Children, Animals and Poetry - Poetics and Ethics of Anthropomorphism (2022).

Kelen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 2019. In 2024, he won the Newcastle Poetry Prize.