Joanna Kavenna (born 1974)Interview. Retrieved 10 April 2020.
/ref> is an English novelist, essayist and travel writer of Welsh extraction. Her six novels have been widely rated and appreciated.

Biography

Welsh by family, with Scandinavian ancestry, Kavenna was born in Leicester and spent her childhood in Suffolk and

the Midlands The Midlands (also referred to as Central England) are a part of England that broadly correspond to the Kingdom of Mercia of the Early Middle Ages, bordered by Wales, Northern England and Southern England. The Midlands were important in the In ...

as well as various other parts of Britain. She has also lived in the United States, France, Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic States. These travels led to her first book, '' The Ice Museum'', which was published in 2005. It was nominated for the

Guardian First Book Award The Guardian First Book Award was a literary award presented by ''The Guardian'' newspaper. It annually recognised one book by a new writer. It was established in 1999, replacing the Guardian Fiction Award or Guardian Fiction Prize that the newspap ...

in that year, and the

Ondaatje Prize The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize is an annual literary award given by the Royal Society of Literature. The £10,000 award is for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry that evokes the "spirit of a place", and is written by someon ...

, and the

Dolman Best Travel Book Award The Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards celebrate the best travel writing and travel writers in the world. The awards include the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year and the Edward Stanford Award for Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing ...

in 2006. Described by ''

The New York Review of Books ''The New York Review of Books'' (or ''NYREV'' or ''NYRB'') is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of i ...

'' as "illuminating and consequential," it combines history, travel, literary criticism and first-person narrative, as the author journeys through Scotland, Norway,

Iceland Iceland ( is, Ísland; ) is a Nordic island country in the North Atlantic Ocean and in the Arctic Ocean. Iceland is the most sparsely populated country in Europe. Iceland's capital and largest city is Reykjavík, which (along with its s ...

, the

Baltic Baltic may refer to: Peoples and languages * Baltic languages, a subfamily of Indo-European languages, including Lithuanian, Latvian and extinct Old Prussian *Balts (or Baltic peoples), ethnic groups speaking the Baltic languages and/or originati ...

and

Greenland Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland i ...

. Along the way, Kavenna investigates various myths and travellers' yarns about the northerly regions, focusing particularly on the ancient

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

story of

Thule Thule ( grc-gre, Θούλη, Thoúlē; la, Thūlē) is the most northerly location mentioned in ancient Greek and Roman literature and cartography. Modern interpretations have included Orkney, Shetland, northern Scotland, the island of Saar ...

, the last land in the North. Before ''The Ice Museum'' she had written several novels that remain unpublished. Kavenna studied at

Linacre College, Oxford Linacre College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in the UK whose members comprise approximately 50 fellows and 550 postgraduate students. Linacre is a diverse college in terms of both the international composition of its me ...

, and has held writing fellowships at St Antony's College, Oxford and St John's College, Cambridge. She was the writer-in-residence at

St Peter's College, Oxford St Peter's College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford and is located in New Inn Hall Street, Oxford, United Kingdom. It occupies the site of two of the university's medieval halls, dating back to at least the 14th ...

for a time. Themes of the country versus the city, the relationship between self and place, and the plight of the individual in hyper-

capitalist Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, priva ...

society recur through both Kavenna's novels and in some of her journalism. She has written for

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

The Huffington Post ''HuffPost'' (formerly ''The Huffington Post'' until 2017 and sometimes abbreviated ''HuffPo'') is an American progressive news website, with localized and international editions. The site offers news, satire, blogs, and original content, and ...

The London Review of Books The ''London Review of Books'' (''LRB'') is a British literary magazine published twice monthly that features articles and essays on fiction and non-fiction subjects, which are usually structured as book reviews. History The ''London Review o ...

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

The Observer ''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the ...

, the International Herald Tribune and

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

, among other publications. She is now based in the Duddon Valley,

Cumbria Cumbria ( ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in North West England, bordering Scotland. The county and Cumbria County Council, its local government, came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. C ...

and has a partner and two young children. In 2013 she was included in the

Granta ''Granta'' is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centres on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and ma ...

list of 20 best young writers.

Novels

Her first published novel, ''Inglorious'', which appeared in 2007, alludes to classics of urban dislocation such as

Knut Hamsun Knut Hamsun (4 August 1859 – 19 February 1952) was a Norwegian writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsun's work spans more than 70 years and shows variation with regard to consciousness, subject, Point of view ...

's ''

Hunger In politics, humanitarian aid, and the social sciences, hunger is defined as a condition in which a person does not have the physical or financial capability to eat sufficient food to meet basic Human nutrition, nutritional needs for a sustaine ...

'', Robert Musil's ''

The Man Without Qualities ''The Man Without Qualities'' (german: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften; 1930–1943) is an unfinished modernist novel in three volumes and various drafts, by the Austrian writer Robert Musil. The novel is a "story of ideas", which takes place in ...

'' and

Saul Bellow Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 July 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only w ...

's ''

Herzog ''Herzog'' (female ''Herzogin'') is a German hereditary title held by one who rules a territorial duchy, exercises feudal authority over an estate called a duchy, or possesses a right by law or tradition to be referred to by the ducal title. ...

''. It was shortlisted for the

John Llewellyn Rhys Prize The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize was a literary prize awarded annually for the best work of literature (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama) by an author from the Commonwealth aged 35 or under, written in English and published in the United Kingdom ...

in 2007 and won the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers. Her second novel, ''

The Birth of Love ''The Birth of Love'' (french: La Naissance de l'amour) is a 1993 drama film directed by Philippe Garrel. Garrel also wrote the screenplay together with his long-time collaborators Muriel Cerf and Marc Cholodenko. Cast * Lou Castel as Paul *Je ...

'' (2010) turns to ideas of power and childbirth and the nature of reality, portraying three characters in three periods of history, whose lives are wholly altered by their experiences of childbirth. Questions about the relationship between technology and nature run through the novel; also the permeable boundaries between reality and fantasy. The first, historical strand is based on the real-life Hungarian-born

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (; hu, Semmelweis Ignác Fülöp ; 1 July 1818 – 13 August 1865) was a Hungarian physician and scientist, who was an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures. Described as the "saviour of mothers", he discovered that t ...

, a doctor working in 19th-century Vienna, who realised that the spread of child-bed or puerperal fever could be prevented if doctors would wash their hands between patients. His theories were generally ignored, and he died in an asylum. Kavenna turns a real-life history into an extract from a (fictional) Gothic novel, in which Semmelweis is visited by an invented character, Robert von Lucius, who begins as a sceptic like the other doctors, but comes to believe Semmelweis. In the second strand, in a recognisable present-day London, a woman called Brigid goes into labour with her second child. Meanwhile, in the third strand, also set in London today, a writer publishes his Gothic novel about Ignaz Semmelweis. In the fourth strand, set in a dystopian future, a prisoner and her captor argue about eugenics and the control of women's bodies. It gradually becomes clear that this society has taken to forcibly sterilising women after an environmental apocalypse, to control population numbers and demands on depleted resources. A group of dissidents has been uncovered, who hid a pregnant woman so that she could give birth naturally. This section clearly pastiches a tradition of dystopian dialogue, from

William Morris William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was a British textile designer, poet, artist, novelist, architectural conservationist, printer, translator and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement. He ...

through

H G Wells Herbert George Wells"Wells, H. G."
Revised 18 May 2015. ''

Marge Piercy Marge Piercy (born March 31, 1936) is an American progressive activist and writer. Her work includes '' Woman on the Edge of Time''; '' He, She and It'', which won the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award; and ''Gone to Soldiers'', a New York Times Best ...

, as well as the classic sci-fi interrogation scene. ''The Birth of Love'' is structured as a quartet. Kavenna draws all her strands together in a climactic final section, in which birth is shown to be a moment in which past, present and future merge. Kavenna has suggested that she wanted to write an "epic" about childbirth, emphasising its central role in the lives of both men and women. It was long-listed for the Orange Prize 2011. Writing about this novel in

Rachel Cusk Rachel Cusk (born 8 February 1967) is a British novelist and writer. Childhood and education Cusk was born in Saskatoon to British parents in 1967, the second of four children with an older sister and two younger brothers, and spent much of h ...

said that the novel is not always "tasteful" but is ultimately "uninhibitedly truthful...daring...and brilliant". Kavenna's third novel, '' Come to the Edge'' (2012) is a satire, set in a fictionalised version of the Duddon Valley,

. Kavenna has explained that: "It's about what happens when you push people too far, when you keep whacking them with one injustice after another – when society gets too plainly iniquitous, and how finally they crack." The novel tells of the surreal events that transpire when the narrator, at a loss in life, answers an advert to be a lodger and farm worker on a remote farm in the Lake District. She goes to the Lakes expecting some usual variation on the reviving and consoling country retreat, but she arrives and discovers the widowed farmer she will be living with, Cassandra White, is a paranoid survivalist and renegade philosopher with all sorts of theories about society, along with strong views on the evils of grain and the vices of "perverts" – Cassandra's term for the rich. The valley is a place of notable contrasts: between the poor who can barely afford to stay in their homes in the Valley, and the rich who buy up second homes and hardly use them. Goaded by a sense of riotous injustice and convinced that wider society cares little about the rural poor, Cassandra and the narrator develop a "resettlement scheme" – to resettle the poor in the empty houses of the rich. The novel is a dark comedy, yet it also makes a serious point throughout, about the iniquities of hyper-consumerist society and the free market notion of ceaseless growth as an inevitable good. Kavenna wrote the book five years ago while living in the Duddon Valley and has said that it took a while to find the right editor for it. Kavenna has also suggested that the novel riffs on the old relationship of the prophet/sage and an interpreter, or the fabulous freak and a less charismatic companion: a venerable tradition from

Plato Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...

and

Socrates Socrates (; ; –399 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no te ...

through the Romantics, which also forms the basis of such novels as

Evelyn Waugh Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (; 28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires '' Decl ...

's ''

Brideshead Revisited ''Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder'' is a novel by English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. It follows, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, the life and romances of the protagonist Charles ...

''and Jack Kerouac's '' On the Road''. Kavenna's fourth novel, ''A Field Guide to Reality'' (2016) imagines a parallel version of Oxford, where a professor has created a "manual for fixing existential angst;" a vast compendium of philosophical thought through the ages. This is the Field Guide to Reality of the title. However, the manual has gone missing and all the characters are trying to find it, for various reasons. Throughout the book, Kavenna considers recurring philosophical questions about the nature of reality and truth. Stuart Kelly in

The Scotsman ''The Scotsman'' is a Scottish compact newspaper and daily news website headquartered in Edinburgh. First established as a radical political paper in 1817, it began daily publication in 1855 and remained a broadsheet until August 2004. Its pare ...

described it as a novel that "deals with the nature of light and enlightenment, quantum physics and strange attractors, grieving and gifting.... There is a very English kind of surrealism at play." In

The Spectator ''The Spectator'' is a weekly British magazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. It was first published in July 1828, making it the oldest surviving weekly magazine in the world. It is owned by Frederick Barclay, who also owns ''The ...

Sam Byers Sam Byers (born 1979) is a British novelist. He was born in Bury St Edmunds and now lives in Norwich, where he studied at the University of East Anglia (MA Creative Writing, 2004; PhD, 2014). Byers' debut novel ''Idiopathy'', a satire based on ...

argued for it as a "work of cunning misdirection and trickery – a mystery in thrall to mystery's beauty."

, referring to "Joanna Kavenna's varied and prodigious output", argued that this "unusual novel... delighted and confounded the critics." It is illustrated by the English songwriter, artist and filmmaker Oly Ralfe, of the

Ralfe Band Ralfe Band is the work of English songwriter Oly Ralfe. The debut album ''Swords'' was released in UK in 2005 by Skint Records and elsewhere in Europe in 2007 by Talitres, with ''Mojo'' awarding a 4-star review, calling it "a whiskey-soured fo ...

, who also worked with the Mighty Boosh. Kavenna has suggested that the novel was partly inspired by the

Jorge Luis Borges Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, as well as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known b ...

story "

The Garden of Forking Paths "The Garden of Forking Paths" (original Spanish title: "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan") is a 1941 short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It is the title story in the collection ''El jardín de senderos que se bifurca ...

", and by contemporary debates about theories of everything.BBC Start the Week
/ref>

References

Bibliography

*2005: ''The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule'', London, Penguin. *2007: ''Inglorious'', London, Faber. *2010: ''The Birth of Love'', London, Faber. *2012: ''Come to the Edge'', London, Quercus. *2014: ''Essays on the Self'', London, Notting Hill Editions. *2016: ''Alchemy'', London, Notting Hill Editions. *2016: ''A Field Guide to Reality'', London, Quercus. *2019: ''Zed'', London, Faber.

External links

Author's official siteFaber author page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kavenna, Joanna 21st-century English novelists Living people Fellows of St Antony's College, Oxford Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge Alumni of Linacre College, Oxford 1974 births