Resources

Primary Works

Peter Owen Publishers have championed Kavan's work for over fifty years and continue to publish many of her books.

Biographies

Callard, David, The Case of Anna Kavan: A Biography, (London: Peter Owen, 1992).
Reed, Jeremy, A Stranger on Earth: The Life and Work of Anna Kavan, (London: Peter Owen, 2006).
Sturm, Jennifer, ed.Anna Kavan's New Zealand: A Pacific Interlude in a Turbulent Life, (Auckland: Vintage, Random House New Zealand, 2009).

Literary Criticism

Aldiss, Brian, 'Kafka's Sister', Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 3:2 (1991). 14-21.
Byrne, Janet, 'Moving Toward Entropy: Anna Kavan's Science Fiction Mentality', Extrapolation 23:1 (1982). 5-11.
Driscoll, Lawrence, 'Planet Heroin: Women and Drugs', Reconsidering Drugs: Mapping Victorian and Modern Drug Discourses. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. 101-27.
Ferris, Natalie, 'The Double Play of Mirrors: Anna Kavan, Autobiography and Self-Portraiture', Women: a cultural review 28:4 (Winter 2017). 285-294.
Gaedtke, Andrew, 'On Worlding and Unworlding in Fiction and Delusion: Muriel Spark and Anna Kavan', Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology and Narrative Worlds. Cambridge: CUP, 2017.
Garrity, Jane, 'Nocturnal Transgressions in The House of Sleep: Anna Kavan's Maternal Registers', Modern Fiction Studies 40:2 (Summer 1994). 253-277.
Houlden, Kate, 'Queering the World or Worlding the Queer? New Readings of Anna Kavan's Who Are You?', Women: a cultural review 28:4 (Winter 2017). 295-311.
Lessing, Doris, 'Anna Kavan', Time Bites. London: Harper Perennial, 2005.
Magot, Céline, 'The Palimpsest Girl in Ice by Anna Kavan, Miranda 12 (2016) miranda.revues.org..
Nelson, Victoria, 'Symmes Hole, or the South Polar Romance', Raritan 17:2 (Fall 1997). 136-166.
Nin, Anaïs, 'The Novel of the Future', The Novel of the Future. MacMillian: London, 1968.
Orpana, Simon Andrew, 'The prism of petrol: drive, desire and the energy unconscious in Anna Kavan's Ice'. Inscriptions 12:1 (2019).
Prowse, Nycole, "Out of Control': Excess, Desire and Agency in Female Drug Writing', Hecate 42:2 (2016). 39-54.
Rao, Eleonora, 'The 'Black Sun': Anna Kavan's Narratives of Abjection', Textus IV (1991). 119-146.
Sweeney, Carole, "Keeping the Ruins Private': Anna Kavan and Heroin Addiction', Women: a cultural review 28:4 (Winter 2017). 312-26.
Sweeney, Carole, 'Cadaverised girls: the writing of Anna Kavan', Textual Practice Online (2018).
Sweeney, Carole, 'Anna Kavan: Glass Girls', Vagabond Fictions: Gender and Experiment in British Women's Writing, 1945-1970. Edinburgh: EUP, 2020.
Van Hove, Hannah, 'Exploring the Realm of the Unconscious in Anna Kavan's Sleep Has His House', Women: a cultural review 28:4 (Winter 2017). 358-74.
Van Hove, Hannah, 'Anna Kavan: Pursuing the 'in-between reality' hidden by the 'ordinary surface of things" in British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s eds. Kaye Mitchell and Nonia Williams. Edinburgh: EUP, 2019. 107-124
Walker, Victoria, 'Ornithology and Ontology: The Existential Birdcall in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Anna Kavan's Who Are You?', Women: a cultural review 23:4 (2012). 490-509.
Walker, Victoria, 'An Introduction to Anna Kavan: New Readings', Women: a cultural review 28:4 (Winter 2017). 285-94.
Walker, Victoria, 'Hearts and Minds: War Neurosis and the Politics of Madness in Anna Kavan's I Am Lazarus', Women: a cultural review 28:4 (Winter 2017). 375-90.
Walker, Victoria, 'Anna Kavan's Ice: Postwar Experimentalism and the Fiction of the Anthropocene', British Experimental Women's Fiction, 1945-1975: 'Slipping through the Labels', eds. Andrew Radford and Hannah Van Hove (London: Palgrave, 2021). 153-172.
Ward, Geoff, 'The Wibberlee Wobberlee Walk: Lowry, Hamilton, Kavan and the Addictions of 1940s Fiction', The Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival, eds. Rod Mengham and N.H. Reeve. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. 26-45.
Wasson, Sara, 'Carceral City, Cryptic Signs: Wartime Fiction by Anna Kavan and Graham Greene', Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Wilson, Janet, 'A Pacific Sojourn: Anna Kavan and the New Zealand Connection, 1941-2', Women: a cultural review 28:4 (Winter 2017). 285-294.
Wilson, Leigh, 'Anna Kavan's Ice and Alan Burns' Europe After the Rain: Repetition with a Difference', Women: a cultural review 28:4 (Winter 2017). 327-42.
Wilson, Leigh, 'Whose Sister? "Convenient Pigeonholes"', Peter Owen and the Publishing of Anna Kavan', British Experimental Women's Fiction, 1945-1975: 'Slipping through the Labels', eds. Andrew Radford and Hannah Van Hove (London: Palgrave, 2021). 83-1-1.
Zultanski, Steven, 'K for KAVAN', Public 28:56 (October 2017). 87-97.

Major Archives

The Anna Kavan Archive at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa holds the largest collection of Kavan's personal papers, photographs, manuscripts, correspondence and paintings.

The Peter Owen Archives at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas contain correspondence between Kavan and her publisher Peter Owen and related material. Other archives in the collection contain letters from Kavan to writers and publishers including the William A Bradley Literary Agency, Francis Henry King, Scorpion Press, John Lehman, Kay Dick and Gerald Hamilton.

The Rhys Davis Papers in the National Library of Wales contains the papers of Kavan's close friend and literary executor Rhys Davies including a small collection of letters from Kavan and papers relating to posthumous publication.

The Walter Ian Hamilton Papers in the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Wellington contain letters from Kavan to Hamilton between 1940 and 1955.

Other archives containing Kavan's correspondence include the Jonathan Cape files in the Random House Archives at the University of Reading and the Koestler Archive in Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections. A small collection of Karl Theodor Bluth's papers are housed in the Deutsches Literatur Archiv in Marbach, Germany.