Joanna Kavenna is a prize-winning British novelist and travel writer who has lived in various parts of Britain, as well as in the United States, France, Germany, Scandinavia, the Baltic States, Sri Lanka, China, and Italy. She was born in Britain and has Welsh and Scandinavian ancestry. Kavenna spent her childhood in Suffolk and the Midlands, as well as other parts of Britain. Her travels and diverse cultural background have significantly influenced her writing, which often explores themes of place, identity, and society.
Kavenna's first book, The Ice Museum, was published in 2005 and was nominated for several prestigious awards, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Ondaatje Prize, and the Dolman Best Travel Book Award. This work combines history, travel, literary criticism, and first-person narrative as Kavenna journeys through Scotland, Norway, Iceland, the Baltic, and Greenland. In The Ice Museum, Kavenna investigates various myths and travelers' tales about the northerly regions, focusing particularly on the ancient Greek story of Thule, the last land in the North. Before publishing The Ice Museum, Kavenna had written several novels that remain unpublished.
In addition to her travel writing, Kavenna is a successful novelist whose work often touches on themes such as the country versus the city, the relationship between self and place, and the plight of the individual in hyper-capitalist society. She has held writing fellowships at St Antony's College, Oxford, and St John's College, Cambridge, and is currently the writer-in-residence at St Peter's College, Oxford. Kavenna has contributed to numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Huffington Post, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Observer, The International Herald Tribune, and The New York Times. She is now based in the Duddon Valley, Cumbria, and has a partner and two young children.