Kapka Kassabova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. At the end of the Cold War her family emigrated first to Britain, then to New Zealand. After twelve years and several books published in New Zealand, she moved to Edinburgh in 2005.
Her first poetry collection, All Roads Lead to the Sea, won a NZ Montana Award for best first poetry book. Her first novel, Reconnaissance, won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Asia-Pacific, and she was twice named NZ Cathay Pacific travel writer of the year for her travel journalism. Two further poetry books are jointly published by Auckland University Press and Bloodaxe: Someone else’s life (2003) and Geography for the Lost (2007).
In 2008 she published the darkly comic travel memoir Street Without a Name: childhood and other misadventures in Bulgaria (Portobello), and in 2011 Twelve Minutes of Love: a tango story (Portobello).
Border: a journey to the edge of Europe (2017), is a meditation on the borderlines that exist between countries and cultures, and within and between people.
Kapka Kassabova now lives in the Scottish Highlands.
