Joanna Kavenna

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Joanna Kavenna is a British author, who is based in the Duddon Valley, Cumbria. She won the 2007 Orange Broadband Award for New Writers. Her first book, The Ice Museum, was published in 2005, and was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and the Ondaatje Prize. In this book, Kavenna combines history, travel, literary criticism and first-person narrative. She travels through Scotland, Norway, Iceland, the Baltic and Greenland, in order to create a cultural history of the ancient Greek notion of Thule, the last land in the North. Throughout the book, Kavenna discusses the interplay between fantasy and reality, between the realms of the imaginary and the real.

This interplay between dream and reality also defines her first novel, Inglorious, which was published in 2007. In this book, the central character Rosa Lane goes on a mythical quest for purpose and meaning in contemporary London. Quotidian facts become hazy and indeterminate as Rosa finds the everyday increasingly mysterious and shadowy. This novel alludes overtly to classics of urban dislocation such as Knut Hamsun's Hunger, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Saul Bellow's Herzog. It won the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers.^[1]

Themes of the country versus the city, the relationship between self and place, and the plight of the individual in hyper-capitalist society also recur throughout Inglorious, as they do in The Ice Museum. These concerns have also defined some of Kavenna's journalism, which has appeared in publications including The London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Observer, The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.

Kavenna has held writing fellowships at St Antony's College, Oxford (where she was also a student) and St John's College Cambridge.