Anna Kavan Society

‘All I can do and all I want to do is write.’ Anna Kavan, 1943

Anna Kavan Society Newsletter - mailchi.mp/5db4900e5d96/a…

New article published by one of our Exec Committee members, Alice Hill-Woods: ‘Which Piece Fits in Precisely Where?’: Disorientation as Queer Strategy in Ann Quin’s Three www-tandfonline-com.bris.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.10…

I felt I belonged to another dimension, and became silent. - Anna Kavan

You can join the Anna Kavan Society here to receive sporadic updates on #AnnaKavan news, publications and events: t.ly/exUX.

Now available to stream, @BBCFreeThinking on the "thrilling enigma" Anna Kavan, with @DrMatthewSweet, @DrVWalker, @northactually, Carole Sweeney and me bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0…

Anna Kavan Society Newsletter - mailchi.mp/d89a8481a5ba/a…

‘It was one of those sunless summer days that are infinitely more depressing than the bleakest winter; days when the whole atmosphere feels stale, and the world seems like a dustbin full of old battered tins of fish scales and decayed cabbage stalks...’ 'An Unpleasant Reminder'

One of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's woodcut portraits of Dr Ludwig Binswanger, who would later become Anna Kavan's psychiatrist and whom she described after his death as 'my closest for many years'.

‘The day was ill-omened from the beginning; one of those unlucky days when every little detail seems to go wrong and one finds oneself engaged in a perpetual and infuriating strife with inanimate objects.’ Anna Kavan 'An Unpleasant Reminder'

A new, in depth feature about Anna Kavan is now available on our website. Visit peterowen.com/news-and-featu… for Miranda Seymour's detailed and vibrant piece! #annakavan

... it's extremely difficult not to despair. One is forced into a position of inactivity, of passive waiting, of nerve-racking suspense ...' Anna Kavan 'The Birds' (1940)

'How is it possible not to lose hope in these circumstances? As the days drag on without bringing forth anything more definite than a number of contradictory whispers or perhaps some equivocal and incomprehensible official communication of which one can't make head or tail...

The Singular, Undeniably Unusual Life of Anna Kavan bit.ly/3dKYIUe

Machines in the Head, a wild and wide-ranging collection of short fiction by the twentieth-century maverick Anna Kavan, is out today! It includes nearly two dozen selections from across her career along with a… instagram.com/p/B8uZVKpBvZ2/…

'Enough heroin to kill the whole street': does Anna Kavan's life overshadow her fiction? theguardian.com/books/2020/feb…

@Cerprice @bethlemmuseum Yes!

@AnnaKavan @bethlemmuseum This is the punnet technique?

Anna Kavan's portrait of her psychiatrist and close friend, Karl Theodor Bluth (1892-1964), now in @bethlemmuseum gallery

Sleep Has His House (1948)

of country churchyards... The weeds of lonely rivers bind her with clammy skeins; the tides of tropical oceans suck off her shoes; crabs scuttle over her eye sockets. Sheeted and anonymous on rubbered wheels she traverses the interminable bleakness of chloroform-loaded corridors.

She plunges from towers strict and terrible in their stark fragile strength, delicate as jerboa’s bones on the sky, perdurable with granite and steel... Limp as an old coat not worth a hanger, she is to be found behind numbered doors in hotel bedrooms; or dangling from the trees