Kapka Kassabova Biography
Kapka Kassabova (born in Sofia in 1973) is a Bulgarian-British writer who writes in English. In the 1990s she emigrated as a teenager with her family to New Zealand, where she published her first collection of poems and a novel. She has lived in Scotland since 2004. As well as several more books of poems she has also written novels and travel stories.
Kapka Kassabova is a critical observer of her old homeland. In her travels and writings she explores the tension between childhood memories and the current reality in the Balkans. Emigration, loss and the discovery of new places on the map of memory are the big themes of her writing. They are rooted deep in her childhood in Communist Bulgaria. Today she turns her gaze on Europe’s new borders and makes a plea for changes in the Balkan region.
I imagine my life as a city
somewhere in the third world, or the second.
And I want to be a tourist
in the city of my life.
...
There is a field of frozen mud,
and in the middle, a pear tree
that bears fruit, still.
...
I consult my great itinerary of confusions
and it appears we've arrived
in the North. The sea-gulls glide,
inordinately large and slow,
...
Here they are, inside the album,
they squint in the September sun
of nineteen-fifty-eight,
of nineteen-eighty-four.
...
which
has over 300 natural lakes
is one of the oldest countries in Europe
...
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