Kevin Kiely (born 2 June 1953) is a poet, critic, author and playwright whose writings and public statements have met with controversy and also with support.
His grandfather's brother was the Olympian John Jesus Flanagan, inventor of the hammer for Slazenger America as used in the Olympic Games, and three-times record-breaking gold medallist.
In 1963 on the death of his father, John Francis Kiely, he was in the care of his guardian and uncle, Edward Vaughan-Neil who sent him to Mt St. Joseph’s Abbey, Roscrea where he was a boarder from 1966 to 1969.
He became a field study technician for Smedley HP in Cambridgeshire 1973–1975 and wandered in Europe working part-time at various jobs while reading in the national libraries of many countries, but otherwise mainly residing in Paris and London.
With publication of the biography of Francis Stuart author of the Penguin Classic Black List, Section H one of twenty-five novels, Kiely found support and condemnation because of Stuart’s conflicted life including the Second World War era in Berlin broadcasting at Haus des Rundfunks which had earned him the scandalous epithet the Irish Lord Haw-Haw.
His most recent adult fiction is The Welkinn Complex, which exposes psychiatric practice and the pharmaceutical industry, while UCD Belfield Metaphysical: a retrospective is a collection of poems published in 2017.
His statements about the Arts Council's Aosdána reflect the wider concern along with other artists such as Robert Ballagh in relation to public funding channels devoid of accountability.
Kiely responded through the Sunday Independent "In supporting the poetry of President Higgins, the Aosdana group prove that their own critical faculty and writing is of the same standard".
[23] Kiely's recent works in criticism, Harvard's Patron Jack of all Poets, about the Woodberry Poetry Room, and critical exegesis Seamus Heaney and the Great Poetry Hoax, prompted the American poet Carlo Parcelli[24] to comment 'Kiely has unmasked a fraud that as he predicted years ago has burgeoned into an institutional conspiracy to honour the mediocre and the sham.