New Zealand Writers

KASSABOVA, Kapka

'Sustained thinking in a musical framework: the various melodies of intelligence.'

KASSABOVA, Kapka (1973 - ) is a poet and novelist. She was born in Sofia, Bulgaria where she lived until emigrating to England, and then New Zealand in 1992. English is Kassabova's fourth language.

Her first collection of poetry, All Roads Lead to the Sea (1997), was an acclaimed and popular debut. In 1998 it was shortlisted for the poetry section of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards and won the NZSA Jessie Mackay award for Best First Book of Poetry.

Kassabova's second collection of poetry is Dismemberment (1998).

Bill Manhire describes the poetry as 'sustained thinking in a musical framework: the various melodies of intelligence.' Bill Direen writes in the NZ Listener of Dismemberment, 'These poems contain the dignity of desire. They show that desire has nothing to do with covetousness, with wanting something because we do not have it. If it is a wish, it is one that physical love often fails to satisfy.'

Kassabova's first novel Reconnaissance (1999) was short-listed for the fiction section of the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and won the Best First Book award in the South East Asia and South Pacific section of the 2000 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Kim Worthington describes the novel in New Zealand Books as "a striking, ambitious achievement... a complex and vivid weaving of stories, memories and dreams."

Kapka Kassabova was awarded a Buddle Findlay Frank Sargeson fellowship in 1999.

In 2002, she was awarded the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency.

(KC. Information from publisher.)

Updated Information

Love in the Land of Midas (2001) is a novel tracing two tales of love.

Someone else's life (2003) includes work fron her two previous collections as well as new poems. Mark Strand writes 'Someone else's life tells with supreme clarity and fearless candor what it means to be adrift in the last years of the woth century and the first of the 21st; it is a book of perpetual exile...in a world that offers neither stability, nor salvation.'

Geography for the Lost (Auckland University Press, 2007). These travelling poems speak from different parts of the world and different moments in time, but they always speak of the many ways to be lost and disoriented: in a place, in the past, in fear, in the very quickness of life. The voices speaking here – from a Roman housewife to a Chinese bar-owner in Berlin or an Argentine DJ – are the voices of the heartsick, the culturally jet-lagged, people from photographs, the ‘tenants’ of lives, cities and destinies.
‘[Geography for the Lost] is a collection by a fine poet. It is deep, mature and unflinching . . . . I read it with a sense of exhilaration.’ - Elizabeth Smither