Anna Kavan – författare

'A strange and compelling classic of dystopian and climate fiction, one that with foreboding and deep compassion maps the psyche and the terrain of dislocation' - Jeff VanderMeer

'One might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future' - New Yorker

Ice will soon cover the entire globe. As the glacial tide creeps forward, society breaks down. Hurtling through the frozen chaos is a nameless narrator, seeking the white-haired girl he once loved, desperate to rescue her - or perhaps to annihilate her. Through nightmarish, ever-shifting scenes, she flees him and his powerful enemy, the Warden. But none of them can outrun the ice.

Anna Kavan's masterwork is an apocalyptic vision of environmental devastation and possessive violence, rendered in unforgettable, propulsive, hallucinatory prose.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

With an introduction by Christopher Priest, author of The Prestige and The Inverted World.

Anna Kavan (1901-1968) was born Helen Woods, the only child of wealthy British expatriates, and grew up travelling through Europe and America. She began publishing under her married name, Helen Ferguson, having left her husband in Burma and returned with her son to live in England. After a mental breakdown in the 1930s she began writing under a new name, taken from one of her characters, and with a new style. She continued writing for another three decades, while frequently using heroin and undergoing several rounds of psychiatric hospitalisation. She died shortly after the publication of Ice, her most celebrated work.

'Her writing is magnificent' Telegraph

'A testament of remarkable, if feverish beauty' Guardian

In an unhappy suburban household, a young girl begins to retreat into a nighttime world of her own imagining. As her daytime life deteriorates, she decides to take up permanent residence in the house of sleep, where rooms change position and dream-tigers prowl. But there are institutions determined to control her. Will they stop her coming home to the dark forever?

A kaleidoscopic autobiographical narrative, written in the language of childhood dreams once known to us all, this is a work of devastating loneliness and stunning imaginative freedom.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Anna Kavan (1901-1968) was born Helen Woods, the only child of wealthy British expatriates, and grew up travelling through Europe and America. She began publishing under her married name, Helen Ferguson, having left her husband in Burma and returned with her son to live in England. After a mental breakdown in the 1930s she began writing under a new name, taken from one of her characters, and with a new style. She continued writing for another three decades, while frequently using heroin and undergoing several rounds of psychiatric hospitalisation. She died shortly after the publication of Ice, her most celebrated work, also published by Pushkin Press.

A collection of fifteen short stories about war and mental illness, from the hallucinatory yet crystalline pen of Anna Kavan

These stories from the cult author of Ice examines war and mental illness from her signature surreal point of view. Inspired by Kavan's own experiences nursing traumatized Second World War soldiers and as a patient in various asylums, these pieces communicate the claustrophobia and isolation of life amidst conflict or caught in the gears of an institutional machine - but also the stunning beauty of physical experience.

In the title story, a young man living in an asylum must navigate the often unreadable reality around him, as we are left to wonder whether the cure harms more than the disease. Outside the asylum grounds, institutions still exert terrifying power, as an unnamed refugee tries to navigate a Kafkaesque bureaucracy to escape a war-ravaged metropolis in 'Our City'. Humanity goes to war with nature, too, in 'The Gannets', a brief, disturbing story that predates Daphne du Maurier's 'The Birds'.

At times cleanly modernist, at others ornately strange and dream-like, Kavan's writing is always propulsive, powered by the tension between the menace closing in around her characters, and the incomparable loveliness of the strange world they inhabit.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Anna Kavan (1901-1968) was born Helen Woods, the only child of wealthy British expatriates, and grew up travelling through Europe and America. She began publishing under her married name, Helen Ferguson, having left her husband in Burma and returned with her son to live in England. After a mental breakdown in the 1930s she began writing under a new name, taken from one of her characters, and with a new style. She continued writing for another three decades, while frequently using heroin and undergoing several rounds of psychiatric hospitalisation. She died shortly after the publication of Ice, her most celebrated work, also available from Pushkin Press.

'This is Anna Kavan at her best: exacting, sympathetic, powerful.' Kate Zambreno

'There is an impressive minimalism at work through much of the collection, an ability to create a destabilising atmosphere without destabilising the text. ... 'Her work, stark with "brilliant light", offers no false consolation. This is one of its enduring strengths.' Chris Power, GUARDIAN

'Now, I can tell you about some women writers who truly are fantastic. One is Anna Kavan. She writes stories like I approach "Land of a Thousand Dances": she's caught in a haze and then a light, a little teeny light, come through. It could be a leopard, that light, or it could be a spot of blood. It could be anything. But she hooks onto that and spirals out. And she does it within the accessible rhythms of plot, and that's really exciting. She's not hung up with being a woman, she just keeps extending herself, keeps telescoping language and plot.' PATTI SMITH, PENTHOUSE