KAVAN, Anna

   Name under which French-born, much travelled UK writer born Helen Woods Edmonds (1901-1968) wrote her fiction from 1940, having previously signed herself under her married name, Helen Ferguson; the orphaned protagonist of Let Me Alone (1930) and A Stranger Still (1935) is named Anna Kavan, and Edmonds eventually became AK by deed poll. Her life, which ended in suicide, was tragically complicated by heroin addiction, and in most of her work fantasy and mental illness surreally intermingle. She was well known for work outside the sf field, though her last work, the sf novel Ice (1967), is as familiar to readers as anything she wrote. It depicts,through compulsively intense imagery which links her with Franz KAFKA and the Surrealists generally, a post- HOLOCAUST search for a woman through a world increasingly shadowed by an approaching ice age. An earlier novel, Eagles' Nest (1958), traverses the same quest landscape, though in fantasyterms. Later editions of Ice carry an introduction by Brian W. ALDISS, in which he claims AK as one of the great sf writers; he also edited the posthumous My Madness: The Selected Writings of Anna Kavan (coll 1990).

   JC

   Other works: Asylum Piece and Other Stories (coll 1940); House of Sleep (1947 US; vt Sleep has his House 1948 UK); A Bright Green Field (coll 1958); Julia and the Bazooka (coll 1970); My Soul is in China (coll 1975).

   See also: END OF THE WORLD; WOMEN SF WRITERS.