For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Joanna Kavenna.
Photograph © Richard Saker for the Observer
Ellah Alfrey talks with Joanna Kavenna about wanderlust, genre-hopping and Nietzsche.
For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Joanna Kavenna.
Photograph © Richard Saker for the Observer
‘The flirtations of insects and plants are furtive, hidden and often so brief that if you literally blink you might miss what exactly is going on.’
Dino J. Martins on moths and orchids, from Granta 153: Second Nature.
‘The origin of the dysfunctional family: spores. / Friend or foe? True fern or ally?’
Poems by Sylvia Legris, author of Garden Physic.
‘And the trees were safely tucked in. Their roots were rallying in the soil, in this coil. Would the woman also take a turn for the better in her last decade?’
Three stories by Diane Williams.
‘walking alone down a country road – / distracted by the slightly annoying and toxic / first green of spring, eyes overflowing’
A poem by Emily Skillings.
‘Whatever the aftermath, you won’t see the city again except through the agency of absence, recalling this semi-emptiness, this viral uncertainty.’
From 2020: China Miéville on the UK government’s response to coronavirus.
Joanna Kavenna is the author of various works of fiction and non-fiction including The Ice Museum, Inglorious, The Birth of Love and A Field Guide to Reality. She was named as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2013. Her latest novel is Zed. Photograph © A. Michaelis
More about the author →
‘We all now exist as avatars, on shining tiles in these cubist landscapes’
Joanna Kavenna discusses her all-too-familiar surveillance dystopia, Zed.
‘She was so understanding, so interesting, such an intellectual. She was also a wristwatch, but this hardly mattered.’
‘We are real in an unreal reality, which we’re told is really real and that we’re actually unreal.’
An excerpt from ZED, the forthcoming novel by Joanna Kavenna, a Granta Best of Young British Novelist.
‘They slept curled together in a hammock, little scraps of fur, hearts beating madly.’ Joanna Kavenna on her pet rats, Kat Bjelland and Courtney Love.
‘Thank any God, our emergency is celestially authorised’
New poetry by Jay G. Ying.
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