Anna Kavan's New Zealand

New Zealanders live 'in temporary shacks, uneasily, as reluctant campers too far from home', wrote Anna Kavan in a London magazine in 1943. Her seemingly negative comments created a stir both in the UK and New Zealand and suggested Kavan felt nothing but antipathy for the country. However, in researching this prize-winning author of nineteen books, Dr Jennifer Sturm uncovered letters and unpublished short stories written during Kavan's sojourn in New Zealand that show a more complex, affectionate and significant response. Those stories are published here for the first time, along with a fascinating discussion of this experimental writer and talented artist, who struggled with bouts of depression and insecurity, as well as heroin addiction and a stream of unconventional love affairs. Kavan roamed the world trying to find a home, and although her stay in New Zealand was for less than two years, her stories reveal a country where she found temporary peace, a country she captures in a warm and astute gaze. This book provides an intriguing insight, not only into the life and writing of Anna Kavan but also New Zealand of the 1940s . * 'a modest looking book which holds within it a kind of time-bomb. The explosiveness relates to Kavan's strangely powerful, even hypnotic talent . . . For Kavan's writing is really an equal to Katherine Mansfield at her best. It shares a crystalline quality, a hypnotic otherness . . . And the whole point of this book is that Kavan, for a precious and small time, wrote herself into existence as a New Zealand writer. Her language has the rhythm of Sargeson. She is deeply observant - and funny - about Torbay locals. But there's that lament which one senses in Mansfield's best stories about New Zealand: here is a world I have lost. If I can only recreate it in words, it will live again. And I will be happy. Kavan's stories - brief, as sharp as Jean Rhys - are usually told in the first person. Some show a startling prescience about race relations in New Zealand and there are brilliantly surreal evocations. This is an unmissable piece of writing . . .' - Peter Wells in CANVAS