Cirrus@Austlit

'Christopher (Kit) Kelen is a poet and painter, resident in the Myall Lakes of NSW. 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, in Greek – his bilingual (Greek and English) volume a postcard from the fires, a picture of the rains, published by Kaleidoscope in Athens, in 2022. Also in 2022, his bilingual Esperanto-English volume Rompitaj Labirintoj – Bung Mazes was published by the Australian Esperanto Association, to coincide with a painting exhibition of that title held at the Shop Gallery in Sydney. A large scale collection of Kit’s – Swimming in the Storm – has just appeared in Romanian, with launches planned for Romania in early 2023. Kit’s latest volume of poetry in English is Book of Mother, published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2022.

'An Anne Elder and ABC/ Bicentennial Award winner in the distant past, in 2017, Kit was shortlisted twice for the Montreal Poetry Prize and won the Local Award in the Newcastle Poetry Prize. In 2019 and 2020 Kit 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. And this year he won the second prize silver medal.

'Kit has been writer/artist in Residence in many parts of the world – in Australia, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Iceland, Finland and Cyprus. A number of these residencies have led to book publications, sometimes multiple – for instance Bundanon time 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).

'As a visual artist, over the last fifteen years, Kit has has had ten solo painting and drawing exhibitions in Australia, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Macao. 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 his scholarly writing, Kit has produced a string of books about poetry, the most recent of which is Poetics and Ethics of Anthropomorphism – Children, animals and poetry, published by Routledge in 2022.' (Production summary)

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'Stuart Barnes is a Tasmanian-born, Queensland-based Australian poet. He is the author of Like to the Lark (Upswell Publishing, 2023) and Glasshouses (UQP, 2016), which won the 2015 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize, was commended for the 2016 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the 2017 Mary Gilmore Award. His poems have appeared on goa (Brisbane’s broadcast roadside digital billboard network), been commissioned for Alcatraz, Australian Poetry Journal, Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Manoeuvres, Memory Book: Portraits of Older Australians in Poetry and Watercolours and Peril Magazine as well as Red Room Company (Poetry Object 2019, Poetry Month 2023), and been widely published in anthologies and journals, including in Admissions: Voices within Mental Health, The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, Best of Australian Poems 2022, Going Postal: More than ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2020, The Language in My Tongue: An Anthology of Australian and New Zealand Prose Poetry, The Moth, POETRY (Chicago) and Poetry Wales. Other poems have been awarded the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, nominated for the Pushcart Prize and shortlisted for the ACU Prize for Poetry, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award, the Montreal International Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize and the Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize.

'Stuart has performed his poetry at Brisbane Writers Festival, Perth Festival Writers Week and Queensland Poetry Festival. From 2013–2017 he was poetry editor of Tincture Journal. Since then he has guest co-edited issues of Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review and Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry and co-judged the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize and the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award. In 2023, Stuart’s poem ‘Off-world Ghazal’ was set to music by award-winning Australian writer Nigel Featherstone and released by Hell Herons, an Australian spoken-word/music collective.' (Production summary)

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