Anna Kavan

British novelist, short story writer and painter, best known for her 1967 novel, Ice, published just a year before her death. Originally publishing under her first married name, Helen Ferguson, she adopted the name Anna Kavan in 1939 as both her pen name and her legal identity.

Kavan regularly travelled to the French Riviera where she was introduced to heroin either by racing car drivers she took up with, a tennis professional who claimed it would improve her game, or through a prescription for morphine to treat depression.

She married Donald Ferguson, a man both ten years her senior and allegedly her mother's former lover, in 1920, a few months before he took a position as a railway administrator in colonial Burma. After moving, Kavan began to write and then gave birth to her son Bryan Gratney Ferguson. In 1923 the marriage collapsed, and Kavan left Ferguson returning with Bryan to the UK.

With her second husband Stuart Edmonds she had a daughter, Margaret, who died soon after childbirth. They then adopted a girl they named Susanna. In 1938, the marriage had begun to sour and Edmonds began an affair, leading the severely depressed Kavan to attempt suicide. She was then sent to a private clinic in Switzerland to recover. This would be the first of many suicide attempts, hospitalizations, and asylum incarcerations throughout Kavan's life for both depression and her lifelong heroin addiction.

In February 1944, Kavan's son from her first marriage, Bryan, died serving in No. 3 Commando during the Second World War.

After her return to the UK, Kavan began treatment with the German psychiatrist Karl Theodor Bluth. They shared an unconventional relationship, with Bluth becoming Kavan's close friend, creative collaborator, and doctor until his death in 1964. He also managed her heroin addiction, and supplied her with the drug. Together, Bluth and Kavan co-wrote the allegorical satire, The Horse's Tale (1949).