Joanna Kavenna

Joanna Kavenna is a prize-winning British novelist and travel writer.

Kavenna spent her childhood in Suffolk and the Midlands as well as various other parts of Britain. She has also lived in the United States, France, Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic States.

These travels led to her first book, The Ice Museum, which was published in 2005. It was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award in that year, and the Ondaatje Prize, and the Dolman Best Travel Book Award in 2006. Described by the The New York Review of Books as "illuminating and consequential," it combines history, travel, literary criticism and first-person narrative, as the author journeys through Scotland, Norway, Iceland, the Baltic and Greenland. Along the way, Kavenna investigates various myths and travellers' yarns about the northerly regions, focusing particularly on the ancient Greek story of Thule, the last land in the North. Before The Ice Museum she had written several novels that remain unpublished.