Anna Kavan is most well-known for her 1967 novel, Ice, published just a year before her death.
27 Facts About Anna Kavan
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Anna Kavan's father, Claude Charles Edward Woods, was a brewer who graduated Jesus College, Cambridge in 1888.
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Anna Kavan was the son of Matthew Charles Woods of Holeyn Hall, Wylam, and the grandson of William Woods, a banker in Newcastle upon Tyne.
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Anna Kavan's parents travelled frequently, and she spent her childhood in both Europe and the United States.
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Anna Kavan has reflected upon her childhood as both incredibly lonely and neglectful, and her fiction often contains portrayals of dysfunctional family relationships.
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Anna Kavan married him in 1920, a few months before he took a position with as a railroad administrator in colonial Burma.
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In 1923, the marriage collapsed and Anna Kavan left Ferguson, returning with Bryan to the UK.
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Anna Kavan regularly travelled to the French Riviera where she was introduced to heroin either by racing car drivers she took up with, a tennis professional who claimed it would improve her game, or through a prescription for morphine to treat depression.
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Anna Kavan was then sent to a private clinic in Switzerland to recover.
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Anna Kavan continued to sign her letters as 'Helen' up until the end of 1940, when she moved to New York.
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An inveterate traveller, Anna Kavan initiated a long journey at the outset of World War II.
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Anna Kavan visited the island of Bali, Indonesia, and stayed for twenty-two months in Napier, New Zealand, her final destination.
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Anna Kavan took a secretarial position at Horizon, an influential literary magazine edited by Cyril Connolly and founded by Peter Watson, one of her friends.
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Anna Kavan managed her heroin addiction, and supplied her with the drug.
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Together, Bluth and Anna Kavan cowrote the allegorical satire, The Horse's Tale, published in 1949 by Gaberbocchus Press.
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Anna Kavan continued to undergo sporadic inpatient treatments for heroin addiction and in her later years in London she lived as a virtual recluse.
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Anna Kavan enjoyed a late triumph in 1967 with her novel Ice, inspired by her time in New Zealand and the country's proximity to the inhospitable frozen landscape of Antarctica.
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Many of Anna Kavan's works were published posthumously, some edited by her friend and legatee, the Welsh writer Rhys Davies.
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Anna Kavan's writing has been compared to that of Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Alan Burns, and Ann Quin.
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In 2009, the Anna Kavan Society was founded in London with the aim of encouraging wider readership and increasing academic scholarship of Kavan's work.
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Anna Kavan's paintings have been recently exhibited at the Zarrow Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
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In September 2014, the Anna Kavan Society organized a one-day symposium at the Institute of English Studies in association with Liverpool John Moores University Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History and Peter Owen Publishers.
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The Anna Kavan Symposium brought together scholars and writers to historicize Kavan's work, situate her within the literary and intellectual context of her times, and chart her legacy as a writer.
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Anna Kavan's work is difficult to situate in fixed literary categories; the scope of her work shows her experimenting with realism, surrealism and absurdism.
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Anna Kavan's writing of madness, asylum incarceration and opiate addiction offer a complex and thought-provoking perspective on early twentieth-century psychiatry and psychotherapy.
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Anna Kavan was friends with the Welsh writer Rhys Davies, who based his 1975 novel Honeysuckle Girl on her early life.
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The largest collection of archival material from Anna Kavan is held by the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives.