Anna Kavan

The Houses of Ice and Sleep, bright green fields, Hoofists and dancing brain-fever birds.

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Anna Kavan: Life and Writing, an evening with Christopher Priest

Join Christopher Priest, Chris Power and Victoria Walker on the 14 November 2019 for a discussion about the life and work of Anna Kavan.

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Anna Kavan Re-Lived: A Tribute by Writers & Artists — The Horse Hospital

A Tribute Event to celebrate the under-sung heroine Anna Kavan, performers will include Jeremy Reed & The Ginger Light , Patricia Hope Scanlan , Geraldine Pilgrim and Andrew McEneff .

New in Kavan Events 2019!

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Crystal clear

Anna Kavan’s writing “is not to everyone’s taste”, admits Victoria Walker in her introduction to Machines in the Head: Selected short writing – and nobody could argue with that. Despite being praised by the Spectator as “the most remarkable female novelist since Virginia Woolf”, Kavan has never attracted a large audience for her unmitigatedly bleak fictions, and, one assumes, never will. Many readers will choose to avoid an author who could write, in 1926, that “real life is a hateful and tiresome dream” and, forty years later, that it is “just a nightmare and the universe has no meaning”. To reverse Graham Greene’s definition of authorly dispassion, Kavan is a writer with a splinter of heart in her ice. She is Beckett without the laughs. Born Helen Woods in Cannes in 1901 to wealthy, uncaring parents, she had a wretchedly miserable childhood. Her father committed suicide when she was…

Latest in Kavan press: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/anna-kavan-ice-machines/

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And the first review of Machines in the Head, from Jonathan Norton, is here.

This is the first indication I’ve had that it contains color reproductions of Kavan paintings I’ve never seen, as well.

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This collection of Anna Kavan’s short fiction and journalism marks fifty years since her death in 1968.

Machines in the Head is now available.

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Futurist figures, 1960. 

(untitled 9, if you’re matching these to the old Jeremy Reed monograph of her art).

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Anna Kavan and friends— taken from The London Magazine, February 1970 Thanks, London Magazine.

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Uncredited image assumed to be a self-portrait, taken from The London Magazine, February 1970

The following piece is taken from The London Magazine, February 1970. It was written by Rhys Davies, a close friend of Anna Kavan’s, and was published alongside the short story ‘The Mercedes’.

The Bazooka Girl-- A Note on Anna Kavan

"She did not know, and would not accept when told, that courage was giving her a degree of triumph....She returned to these stories, a valid discipline, and their clarity of style, their spurning of sensationalism and their own code of logic, were another justification of her vision. "

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Feminize Your Canon : Anna Kavan | The Paris Review

Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors.

"Her work spans multiple genres, an approach always less permissible in women writers, and is astonishingly avant-garde even to the contemporary reader."

“She cast doubts, she lied, she fabricated, she spoke the truth, she was most honest,” wrote the drama critic Raymond Marriott, a friend and coexecutor of her estate. “But where did it begin and where did it end?”

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Two untitled paintings of swans (no.3, 1950, and no.4, 1960)

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A collection of rarely seen, though tragically tiny, drawings from ANNA KAVAN: An Illustrated Catalogue, 2005.

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ANNA KAVAN: An Illustrated Catalogue. Lucius / Punk Daisy Publications., 2005, with rarely seen paintings and future biographer Jeremy Reed’s essay “A Blonde Legend and Exploding Into Colour”. Edition of 50 signed hardcover (pictured) and 950 softcover. 

I’m surprised to only just have heard of this one, and by the lack of good images online at least some of the enclosed paintings and drawings. Of course, many have been scanned -- I realize now that many of the images I gathered in 2013 and have been posting since originated here, and my posts have maintained this book’s numbering of untitled works.

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Apt artwork for the most recent hardcover reprint of Ice -- Wish You Were Here by Naomi Frears, 2006. More about that artwork here.

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On this, the 50th Anniversary of Anna Kavan’s death, we’ve just learned that she has a brand new collection forthcoming from Peter Owens in May 2019, including many never-collected articles (apparently some (all?!) of those we’d previously had to hunt through archived Horizons issues for). The collection is edited by Victoria Walker, chair of the Anna Kavan Society, who are currently also seeking funds to place a memorial plaque at her former residence at Hillsleigh Road, London W8.

This collection of Anna Kavan’s short fiction and journalism marks fifty years since her death in 1968. From moving portraits of clinical depression to phantasmagoric visions of sci-fi wonder – including the previously unpublished story ‘Starting a Career’ – the writings collected in Machines in the Head offer an accessible introduction to readers new to her work and a timely survey of Kavan's diverse writing talents for her fans. Her journalism, giving insight into her radical politics and her thoughts on writing and writers, is reproduced in full.

More information here: https://www.peterowen.com/shop/anna-kavan-anthology

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by Victoria Walker (PhD Thesis, 2012) Abstract This thesis is a study of the British writer Anna Kavan (1901-1968). It begins by tracing Kavan’s life and examining the mythologies around her radical selfreinvention (in adopting the name of her own fictional character), madness and drug addiction. It attempts to map a place for her previously neglected work in twentieth-century women’s writing and criticism. Close reading of Kavan’s fiction attends to her uses of narrative voice in representing a divided self. Given Kavan’s treatment by the Swiss existential psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, the thesis explores connections between her writing and the British anti-psychiatry movement, especially R D Laing. Focussing primarily on the Modernist and Postmodern aspects of Kavan’s work, it also notes Gothic and Romantic inflections in her writing, establishing thematic continuity with her early Helen Ferguson novels. The first chapter looks at Kavan’s first collection of stories, Asylum Piece (1940) and her experimental novel, Sleep Has His House (1947). It reads her portrait of institutionalization as a nascent critique of asylum treatment, and considers Anaïs Nin’s longstanding interest in her work. Chapter Two draws on research into Kavan’s experiences during the Second World War, particularly her time working with soldiers in a military psychiatric hospital. Reading her second collection of stories I Am Lazarus (1945) as Blitz writing, it connects her fiction with her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944) and explores the pacifist and anarchistic views in her writing. The third chapter, a reading of the novel Who Are You? (1963), argues that Kavan engages with existential philosophy in this text and explores parallels with Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. The final chapter looks at Kavan’s last and best known work, Ice (1967). Following Doris Lessing, this chapter reads the novel’s sadism as a political response to the Second World War. Contesting critical interpretations which have pathologized Kavan’s fiction as solipsistic representations of her own experiences, this thesis aims to resituate her as a politically-engaged writer of her time.

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Self portrait by Anna Kavan Listen to episode #11 Ice by Anna Kavan Anna Kavan’s Ice was originally published in 1967 by Peter Owen books. The book is Kavan’s final and best known work, and appeared just one year before her death. In the aftermath of a nuclear war, society is rapidly crumbling as a wall of ice threatens to engulf the entire planet. Our unnamed narrator roams through this barren, frozen wasteland in pursuit of a young girl with a halo of hair as bright as spun glass; his designs on her are decidedly sinister. The novel proceeds with the torturous, cyclical quality of an inescapable nightmare in which the reader is cocooned. Over the course of the episode, we discuss the extent to which Kavan's heroin addiction influenced the novel, consider the novels place in the tradition of post-apocalyptic fiction, and explore the unique brutality of the novel's narrator.

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In an interview just before she died Anna Kavan said, ‘I haven’t felt anything for 20 years.’

BOOK REVIEW / Ice-maiden stung by a spider: ‘Change the Name’ - Anna Kavan: Peter Owen, 15.50 - Books, Arts & Entertainment - The Independent (via theredshoes)