Kavenna was born in Leicester and grew up in Suffolk and the Midlands as well as various other parts of Britain. She read English Literature at the University of Bristol before writing a PhD thesis at Oxford University on the poetry of Charlotte Mew. She has also lived in the United States, France, Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic States. This experience lay behind her first book, The Ice Museum, 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. It combines history, travel, literary criticism and first-person narrative, as the author travels through Scotland, Norway, Iceland, the Baltic and Greenland. This builds up into a cultural history of the ancient Greek notion of Thule, the last land in the North. Before The Ice Museum she had written several novels that remain unpublished.

Kavenna has held writing fellowships at St Antony's College, Oxford and St John's College, Cambridge. She is currently the writer-in-residence at St Peter's College, Oxford St Peter's announces writer-in-residence role. Themes of the country versus the city, the relationship between self and place, and the plight of the individual in hyper-capitalist society recur through both Kavenna's novels and in some of her journalism. She has written for The London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Observer, The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. She is now based in the Duddon Valley, Cumbria and has a partner and two young children.

Her first published novel, Inglorious, which appeared in 2007, alludes to classics of urban dislocation such as Knut Hamsun's Hunger, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Saul Bellow's Herzog. It was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2007 and won the Orange Broadband Award for New Writers. Joanna Kavenna's Inglorious wins Orange new writers award 2008 | Books | guardian.co.uk

Her second novel, The Birth of Love (2010) turns to ideas of power and gender, portraying three characters in three different periods of history, whose lives are fundamentally altered by their experiences of childbirth. Questions about the relationship between technology and nature run through the novel. The first, historical strand is based on the real-life Hungarian-born Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, a doctor working in 19th-century Vienna, who realised that the spread of child-bed or puerperal fever could be prevented if doctors would wash their hands between patients. His theories were generally ignored, and he died in an asylum. In the second strand, in a recognisable present-day London, a woman called Brigid goes into labour with her second child. Meanwhile, in the third strand, also set in London today, a writer publishes his novel about Ignaz Semmelweis. In the fourth strand, set in a dystopian future, a prisoner and her captor argue about eugenics and the control of women's bodies. It gradually becomes clear that this society has taken to forcibly sterilising women after an environmental apocalypse, to control population numbers and demands on depleted resources. A group of dissidents has been uncovered, who hid a pregnant woman so that she could give birth naturally. This section makes reference to a tradition of dystopian dialogues, from William Morris through H G Wells, to Marge Piercy, as well as the classic sci-fi interrogation scene.

The Birth of Love is structured as a quartet. Kavenna draws all her strands together in a climactic final section, in which birth is shown to be a moment in which past, present and future merge. This suggests that Kavenna is playing with or subverting the fashionable idea of postmodern collapse. Kavenna has suggested that she wanted to write an 'epic' about childbirth, emphasising its central role in the lives of both men and women. Kavenna talks about her new novel | Books | guardian.co.uk