Joanna Kavenna

Joanna Kavenna is a British novelist and essayist whose work explores the shifting boundaries between reality and imagination, and the ways in which individuals and societies make sense of a rapidly changing world. She is the author of The Ice Museum, Inglorious, The Birth of Love, Come to the Edge, A Field Guide to Reality, Zed, and, most recently, Seven. Her debut novel, Inglorious, won the Orange Award for New Writers, and in 2013 she was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists. In 2024, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Kavenna's fiction is distinguished by its engagement with pressing social, political, and economic questions, which she examines through imaginative, intellectually ambitious, and often darkly comic narratives. Blending philosophical inquiry, satire, and speculative fiction, her writing frequently investigates the intersections of technology, inequality, power, and individual freedom.

In Come to the Edge, Kavenna explores inequality in contemporary Britain through a satirical conflict between those who possess wealth and property and those excluded from its benefits. Her 2019 novel Zed imagines a near-future society shaped by Big Tech, algorithms, surveillance, and corporate power, examining the social and economic consequences of allowing systems designed for efficiency and prediction to govern human lives.

Rather than presenting straightforward utopian or dystopian visions, Kavenna questions the assumptions underpinning contemporary society and invites readers to imagine alternative ways of living and organising collective life.

Alongside her fiction, Kavenna has written essays and journalism for The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Observer, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times. She has also held writing fellowships at St Antony's College, Oxford, and St John's College, Cambridge.