Literary Birthday – 10 April – Anna Kavan

Anna Kavan was born on 10 April 1901 and died on 5 December 1968.

Anna Kavan Quotes

1. Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me. (Ice)
2. Because of my fear that the daytime world would become real, I had to establish reality in another place. (Sleep Has His House)
3. Where do I always find enough courage for one last hope? I am the enemy of this indestructible, pitiless hope which prolongs and intensifies all my pain. I would like to lay hold of hope and strangle it once and for all. (I Am Lazarus)
4. I had a curious feeling that I was living on several planes simultaneously; the overlapping of these planes was confusing. (Ice)
5. My ideas were confused. In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind. (My madness: the selected writings of Anna Kavan)
6. There is, I believe, a kind of telepathy between the condemned: a sort of intuitive recognition which can even make itself felt through the medium of the printed page. (I Am Lazarus)

Anna Kavan was a British novelist, short story writer, and painter. Kavan described her childhood as both lonely and neglectful, and her fiction dealt with dysfunctional family relationships. She was famous for her semi-autobiographical surreal fiction with its themes of mental breakdown and self-destruction. She used slipstream fiction techniques in her writing. She first wrote six novels under the name Helen Ferguson, notably Let Me Alone in 1930, a narrative of a troubled woman in a violent marriage. After her first divorce, she was placed in a mental institution for heroin addiction. She legally changed her name to Anna Kavan and received critical acclaim for Asylum Piece, which she followed with the novel Change the Name, the short-story collection I Am Lazarus, and the autobiographical Sleep Has His House. Her reputation declined until the publication of Who Are You? in 1963, and Ice in 1967, a surreal novel about a man in pursuit of a woman across a frozen wilderness. She died a year later and some of her work was published posthumously.

Source for image: Licensed under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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by Amanda Patterson

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