You can use Keyboard module to detect keys pressed. It can be installed by using pip. You can find the documentation here. Keyboard API docs

pip install keyboard

check the below code to understand how it can be done.

import sys
import keyboard
a=[1,2,3,4]
print("Press Enter to continue or press Esc to exit: ")
while True:
    try:
        if keyboard.is_pressed('ENTER'):
            print("you pressed Enter, so printing the list..")
            print(a)
            break
        if keyboard.is_pressed('Esc'):
            print("\nyou pressed Esc, so exiting...")
            sys.exit(0)
    except:
        break

Output:

Here is the solution for Windows I was looking for:

import ctypes

VK_ESCAPE = 0x1B
ctypes.windll.user32.keybd_event(VK_ESCAPE)

Beeing written as a function and appended to bpy.app.handlers.render_pre it simulates pressing ESC on the keyboard and aborts the render.

In my addon I used another solution: it turned out to be possible to replace original Blender main top Render menu with custom one which buttons execute addon's operators instead of original Blender's. It was done by recreating inside the script and re-registering original class TOPBAR_MT_render(bpy.types.Menu) which can be found in your Blender current version folder -> scripts -> startup -> bl_ui -> space_topbar.py

Also I replaced operators for original keymap shortcut settings by editing bpy.context.window_manager.keyconfigs.active.keymaps['Screen'].keymap_items, so in the end user uses the same buttons and shortcuts he used to, but they execute addon's operators instead of original ones, and this is suitable for every system, not only for Windows.

Python 3 strings are unicode and, therefore, must be encoded to bytes for comparison. Try this test:

if msvcrt.kbhit() and msvcrt.getch() == chr(27).encode():
    aborted = True
    break

Or this test:

if msvcrt.kbhit() and msvcrt.getch().decode() == chr(27):
    aborted = True
    break

Or this test:

if msvcrt.kbhit() and ord(msvcrt.getch()) == 27:
    aborted = True
    break

you can use pynput,it's easier to use.

from pynput import keyboard

def _start():
     print("HelloWorld")
def on_press(key):
    if key == keyboard.Key.esc:
        # Stop listener
        return False
    else:
        _start()

# Collect events until released
with keyboard.Listener(
        on_press=on_press) as listener:
    listener.join()

Python has a keyboard module with many features. Install it, perhaps with this command:

pip3 install keyboard

Then use it in code like:

import keyboard  # using module keyboard
while True:  # making a loop
    try:  # used try so that if user pressed other than the given key error will not be shown
        if keyboard.is_pressed('q'):  # if key 'q' is pressed 
            print('You Pressed A Key!')
            break  # finishing the loop
    except:
        break  # if user pressed a key other than the given key the loop will break

First of all, you forgot to close the strings on lines 4 and 6.

But your main issue is that you call keyboard.read_key() once for each arm of your if statement. This makes your code wait for a keypress, check if it's 'enter', then wait for another keypress, check if it's 'q', and so on.

What you should do is save the key to a variable, then check the variable. It should look something like this:

import keyboard
while True:
    key = keyboard.read_key()
    if key == 'enter':
        print('Enter is pressed')
    if key == 'q':
        print('Quitting the program')
        break
    if key == 's':
        print('Skiping the things')