Kapka Kassabova

Kapka Kassabova is a poet and writer of narrative prose. At the core of her work is a quest for transformative encounter with places and people. Margins, confluences, aftermaths – those are her places. In the last decade she has created a body of work which organically grew into the Balkan quartet. Each book takes her into a region of the southern Balkans in, and bordering, Bulgaria. These are rich human and natural ecosystems scarred by political trauma. The first pair are Border (2017) and To The Lake (2020). They explore collective histories. The final pair are Elixir (2023) and Anima (2024). They explore how humans, plants and animals are bound in a vitalising interdependence.

She was born in November 1973 in Sofia to scientist parents and studied at the French Lycée. In 1992, her family emigrated to New Zealand where she studied Linguistics and French Literature at Otago University and English Literature and Creative Writing at Victoria University. She started writing poetry in early childhood. In the first years of life in New Zealand, she moved uneasily from her mother tongue Bulgarian to English as a new literary language. Her first published books reflect this fractured state – the poetry collections All roads lead to the sea and Dismemberment, and the novels Reconnaissance and Love in the Land of Midas. This early work was awarded a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and a NZ Montana Book Award.

In 2005 she emigrated to Edinburgh, Scotland, where she wrote Street Without a Name (2008). This is a coming-of-age story in the twilight years of Communism and a journey across post-Communist Bulgaria.

Twelve Minutes of Love (2011) blends a tale of obsession with a history of the Argentine tango.

Villa Pacifica (2011) is a novel set in coastal Ecuador and came out at the same time.

Her last poetry books are Someone else’s life and Geography for the Lost.

Border (Granta) is a journey with the people and the histories of the triple borderlands of Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece.

To The Lake (Granta) delves into the ancestral geography of Lakes Ohrid and Prespa. A personal journey to the roots of her maternal family line became a meditation on conflict and reconciliation.

Elixir (Cape) is a search for collective healing through ultimate presence. The journey took her into a symbiotic web of people and plants along the Mesta River.

Anima, a wild pastoral (Cape 2024) is a tale of extinction and salvation, and a portrayal of the modern transhumance shepherds. It is set on the flanks of Pirin Mountain where she lived with a small pastoral community for a season.

The Insides of Our Lives, a found-footage film by Misja Pekel with her words premiered in 2024 at the Movies That Matter Festival in the Hague.

Her books are translated into 20 languages. She remains bilingual with English her primary literary language and Bulgarian second.

She has served on the jury panels for the Makedox Documentary Film Festival, le Prix Jan Michalski, the Highland Book Prize, the Neustadt Prize, the 2019 Jihlava Documentary Film Festival, and the International Dublin Book Award. In 2020-2021, she was non-resident Fellow at the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences (IWM).

For the last fifteen years she has lived by the Beauly River in the Highlands of Scotland. In April 2026 she will publish her first book with a Scottish setting, starring my glen: Borrowed Land, a highland story (Cape).