Kapka Kassabova is a poet, essayist and travel writer who was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1973.. After leaving Bulgaria as a teenager and living in England and New Zealand, she now resides in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The Australian journalist Clive James has said of her: “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.”
All Roads Lead to the Sea, Auckland University Press, 1997;
Dismemberment, Auckland University Press, 1998;
Reconnaissance, Penguin Books, NZ, 1999;
Love in the Land of Midas, Penguin Books, NZ, 2001;
Someone Else's Life, Bloodaxe, 2003;
Geography for the Lost, Bloodaxe, 2007;
Villa Pacifica, Penguin Books, NZ, 2010
In 2008, Kassabova published Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria, which The Guardian newspaper called a "profound meditation on the depth of change triggered by the events of 1989 throughout eastern Europe" .