Kapka Kassabova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and now lives in the Scottish Highlands. She is the author of several poetry collections, numerous travel essays, the novel Villa Pacifica (2011), and the acclaimed memoirs Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (2008); Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story (2011) and Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (2017), which won the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year 2017, the 2017 Highland Book Prize and the Saltire Society Book of the Year 2017, and was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018, the Baillie Gifford Prize 2017, the Duff Cooper Prize 2017, the Bread and Roses Award 2018, the Gordon Burn Prize 2017 and the National Circle of Critics Award 2017. She has written for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, Vogue, and 1843 magazine.

kapka-kassabova.net

Born in Sofia, Kapka Kassabova grew up under the last years of Cold War Communism in the 1980s, emigrated after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and has loved and hated her homeland in equal measure ever since. Thirty years later, as Bulgaria was joining the EU club, Kapka revisited the country of her childhood and her own relationship to it to discover just how much it - and she - had changed. With the irreverence of an expat, the curiosity of a visitor, and the soul of a poet, Kassabova brings to life the past and present of Bulgaria, as well as probing the complicated connection between place and mind, between geography and fate.