Kris Hemensley

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Kris Alan Hemensley (born 26 April 1946) is an English-Australian poet who has published around 20 collections of poetry. Through the late 1960s and '70s he was involved in poetry workshops at La Mama, and edited the literary magazines Our Glass, The Ear in a Wheatfield, and others. The Ear played an important role in providing a place where poets writing outside what was then the mainstream (such as Jennifer Maiden^[1]) could publish their work. In 1969 and 1970 he presented the program Kris Hemensley's Melbourne on ABC Radio. In the 1970s he was poetry editor for Meanjin

The son of an Egyptian mother and an English father who was stationed in Egypt with the Royal Air Force, Hemensley was born on the Isle of Wight, and spent his early childhood in Alexandria. He visited Australia at the age of 18, and emigrated there in 1966. He was awarded the Christopher Brennan Award in 2005, which recognizes poetry of "sustained quality and distinction".

Hemensley managed Collected Works, a specialist poetry bookshop in Melbourne, Australia, until it closed down in late 2018.^[2]