Kenn Harper prefers to be known as a historian, writer, and linguist, although some people remember him as a successful businessman, a career from which he is happily retired. He is a knight, although he eschews any hint of shining armour. Kenn is a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog (Denmark), a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, a former member of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, a former member of the Nunavut Implementation Commission, a former Honourary Consul for Denmark in Nunavut, and a recipient of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee Medal.

Kenn is the author of Minik, The New York Eskimo (Steerforth Press, 2017; a re-issue and update of his best-selling Give Me My Father’s Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo, which has been published in nine languages). He also wrote Thou Shalt Do No Murder: Inuit, Injustice, and the Canadian Arctic (Nunavut Arctic College Media, 2017). His most recent book, Give Me Winter, Give Me Dogs: Knud Rasmussen and the Fifth Thule Expedition (Inhabit Media, 2024), is the account of a Danish-Greenlandic ethnographical expedition to the Inuit of northern Canada and Alaska one hundred years ago.

He writes a history column, "Taissumani" for Nunatsiaq News in Iqaluit. Some of his columns have been collected and published thematically in a series In Those Days: Collected Writings on Arctic History (Inhabit Media).

Kenn lived in the Arctic (Nunavut and Greenland) for fifty years and is passionate about Arctic history and the survival of the Inuktitut language, which he speaks and writes fluently. He is a book collector, specializing in rare Inuktitut language material.

Kenn is married to a writer, Kathleen Lippa. They divide their time between Ottawa and St. John’s, and share their home with a pug named Kippy.