Kapka Kassabova
Kapka Kassabova is a poet and writer of fiction and narrative non-fiction. She was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and, with the thawing of the Cold War, emigrated with her family, first to Britain, then to New Zealand, where she went to university. After twelve years and several publications there, she moved to Edinburgh, and for the last ten years has lived by the Beauly River in the Highlands.
Her first poetry collection, All Roads Lead to the Sea (Auckland University Press, 1997) won a NZ Montana Award for best first poetry book. Her first novel, Reconnaissance (Penguin, 1999) 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).
The exploration of place fuels her work, with a focus on the intimate relationship between the human and the more-than-human world.
In 2008 she published the darkly comic travel memoir Street Without a Name: childhood and other misadventures in Bulgaria, and in 2011 Twelve Minutes of Love: a tango story (both Portobello).
Border: a journey to the edge of Europe (Granta, 2017), is a meditation on the borderlines that exist between countries and cultures, between and within people and was the recipient of a number of literary prizes in the UK and Europe, Kassabova’s work having been translated into twenty languages..
Her most recent publication is To The Lake (Granta, 2020), which continued the polyphonic qualities of its predecessor and again is set in different parts of the southern Balkans, exploring how the behaviour of individuals, families and nations is shaped by geography and politics.
Her next book will be titled Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time (Cape, 2023).