Kapka Kassabova

Kapka Kassabova (b.1973) is a poet, novelist, travel writer, and professionally displaced person. Bulgarian-born and bred, she was educated at a French Lycée in Bulgaria, a Sixth Form College in Britain, and two New Zealand universities from which she holds a BA Hons in French Literature and a MA in Creative Writing and English. For the last 12 years she has been mainly based in New Zealand, but a year ago she moved to Britain.

 Her first book of poetry All roads lead to the sea (Auckland University Press 1997) won a NZ Montana Book Award for best first poetry book, and her second poetry book Dismemberment came out in 1998. She has written two novels the first of which, Reconnaissance (Penguin NZ), won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first novel in the South-East Asia-Pacific Region. She was the 2002 and 2004 NZ Cathay Pacific Travel Writer of the Year for her travel journalism. She also co-authored the Globetrotter's Guide to Delhi, Jaipur and Agra.

In 2002-2003, Kapka held the Creative NZ Berlin Writer's Residency. In 2003-2004 she taught Creative Writing at the University of Auckland, NZ where she inaugurated the Creative Writing Summer School.

Her latest book is the poetry collection Someone else's life (2003, Bloodaxe/Auckland University Press).

'In the suitcase that she has mentally lived out of since she was a little girl, Kapka Kassabova has brought the turbulent memories of 20th century European history with her to New Zealand, where she recollects bad dreams in comparative tranquillity, and always with the phrasing of a born musician. If her finely pitched lyricism is the first thing that strikes you, the second is the richness of sympathy that lies behind it. As if she owed her gifts and blessings to them, she speaks for the generations before her whose lives were ruined. The result is a truly international picture of what it means to be young and sensitive in the modern world. In a short life, she has already established a unique literary identity.'
 - Clive James

'Someone else's life tells with supreme clarity and fearless candor what it means to be adrift in the last years of the 20th century and the first of the 21st. It is a book of perpetual exile, of endless comings and goings, in a world that offers neither stability, nor salvation. Still, the very intelligence of this book - sceptical, riveting, passionate - suggests that there may be an answer to the uncertainty that is everywhere around us.'
- Mark Strand, US Poet Laureate

Personal web-site
www.kapka-kassabova.com

Featured poet
http://www.clivejames.com/library/section/?&LID=2&SID=16&IP=1

New Zealand book council information
http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/kassabova.html