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Anna Kavan, née Helen Woods, was born in Cannes — probably in 1901; she was, at best, evasive about the facts of her life — and spent her childhood in Europe, the United States and Great Britain. Her life was haunted by her rich, glamorous mother, beside whom her father remains an indistinct figure. Twice married and divorced, she began writing while living with her first husband in Burma and was initially published under her married name of Helen Ferguson. Her early writing consisted of somewhat eccentric 'Home Counties' novels, but everything changed after her second marriage collapsed. In the wake of this, she suffered the first of many nervous breakdowns and was confined to a clinic in Switzerland. She emerged from her incarceration with a new name - Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her 1930 novel Let Me Alone - an outwardly different persona and a new literary style. She suffered periodic bouts of mental illness and long-term drug addiction - she had become addicted to heroin in the 1920s and continued to use it throughout her life — and these facets of her life feature prominently in her work. She destroyed almost all of her personal correspondence and most of her diaries, therefore ensuring that she achieved her ambition to become 'one of the world's best-kept secrets'. She died in 1968 of heart failure, soon after the publication of her most celebrated work, the novel Ice.

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