Is there a way to check whether a related object is already fetched?

Since Django 2.0 you can easily check for all fetched relation by:

obj._state.fields_cache

ModelStateFieldsCacheDescriptor is responsible for storing your cached relations.

>>> Person.objects.first()._state.fields_cache
{}
>>> Person.objects.select_related('address').first()._state.fields_cache
{'address': <Address: Your Address>}

Per this comment on the ticket linked in the comment by @jaap3 above, the recommended way to do this for Django 3+ (perhaps 2+?) is to use the undocumented is_cached method on the model's field, which comes from this internal mixin:

>>> person1 = Person.objects.first()
>>> Person.address.is_cached(person1)
False

>>> person2 = Person.objects.select_related('address').last()
>>> Person.address.is_cached(person2)
True

If the address relation has been fetched, then the Person object will have a populated attribute called _address_cache; you can check this.

def is_fetched(obj, relation_name):
    cache_name = '_{}_cache'.format(relation_name)
    return getattr(obj, cache_name, False)

Note you'd need to call this with the object and the name of the relation:

is_fetched(person, 'address')

since doing person.address would trigger the fetch immediately.

Edit reverse or many-to-many relations can only be fetched by prefetch_related; that populates a single attribute, _prefetched_objects_cache, which is a dict of lists where the key is the name of the related model. Eg if you do:

addresses = Address.objects.prefetch_related('person_set')

then each item in addresses will have a _prefetched_objects_cache dict containing a "person' key.

Note, both of these are single-underscore attributes which means they are part of the private API; you're free to use them, but Django is also free to change them in future releases.