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A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two vast lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabova's maternal family. As she journeys to her grandmother's place of origin, Kassabova encounters a civilizational crossroads. The Lakes are set within the mountainous borderlands of North Macedonia, Albania and Greece, and crowned by the old Roman road, the via Egnatia. Once a trading and spiritual nexus of the southern Balkans, it remains one of Eurasia's oldest surviving religious melting pots. With their remote rock churches, changeable currents, and large population of migratory birds, the Lakes live in their own time. By exploring the stories of dwellers past and present, Kassabova uncovers the human history shaped by the Lakes. Soon, her journey unfolds to a deeper enquiry into how geography and politics imprint themselves upon families and nations, and confronts her with questions about human suffering and the capacity for change.
Winner of the the British Academy Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2018 Winner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year 2017 Winner of the 2017 Highland Book Prize Winner of the Saltire Society Book of the Year 2017 Shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018 Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2017 Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize 2017 Shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award 2018 Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2017 Shortlisted for the National Circle of Critics Award 2017 When Kapka Kassabova was a child, the borderzone between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece was rumoured to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall so it swa...
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.
From a writer who is as dazzling on the dance-floor as she is on the page, here is the hidden story of tango: the world's most passionate dance.
‘A classic in the making for our times’ MONIQUE ROFFEY ‘Haunting, beautiful...Anima will live with me for a long time’ CAL FLYN ‘A beautiful book of passion and adventure... She is simply sublime’ HORATIO CLARE The spellbinding new book by the prizewinning writer Kapka Kassabova tells the story of her time with the last moving pastoralists in Europe: a gripping portrayal of human-animal interdependence, and a plea for a different way of living. Living with one of these communities over the course of one summer, Kassabova experiences the intensity, brutality, beauty and isolation of their existence. She witnesses the epic, orchestrated activity of transhumance – the seasonal mov...
'Tangled with darkness like its lush, decaying setting, Villa Pacifica had me gripped to the very end.'—Emily Perkins A couple arrive in a dead-end coastal village somewhere in South America. The only place to stay is Villa Pacifica, part hotel and part animal sanctuary run by eccentric ex-pats. Travel guide-writer Ute and her husband Jerry are joined by an assortment of travellers: in-your-face American Max; sporty flight attendants from Australia; musicians Luis and Helga – all looking for something out of the ordinary. Ute begins to meet the locals and explore the villa's surrounds. She senses that the place taps into her most intimate fears. Its disturbances may well be beyond the ra...
All Roads Lead to the Sea is a first collection of poetry from a young Bulgarian immigrant poet. Her work had already attracted considerable attention, with a special issue of Poetry New Zealand featuring her poems. Her moody, evocative poems brilliantly convey the rootlessness and restlessness of the immigrant, the mingled sense of loss and wonder in the new land, the nostalgia and the longing, the hopes and the memories. The three parts of the book mirror a passage from dislocation to exploration to looking forward, with the last part dominated by the image of the sea. These haunting, powerful poems introduce a fresh and original talent.
Writers of creative non-fiction are often expected to be able to recreate reality, to deal with, or even access, a singular truth. But the author, like any human, is not an automaton remotely tasked with capturing a life or an event. Whether we tell stories and understand them as fiction or non-fiction, or whether we draw away from these classifications, writers craft and shape writing all writing. No experience exists on a flat plane, and recounting or interpreting events will always involve some element of artistic manipulation: every instance, exchange, discussion, event is open to multiple interpretations and can be described in many ways, all of which are potentially truthful. Writing C...
Nominated for ten UK book awards, Theresa Breslin's hit novel tells of how two young boys - one Rangers fan, one Celtic fan - are drawn into a secret pact to help a young asylum seeker in a city divided by prejudice. Now adapted for the stage by Martin Travers, the play has already been produced to great acclaim at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre. Graham and Joe just want to play football and be selected for the new city team, but a violent attack on Kyoul, an asylum seeker, changes everything when they find themselves drawn into a secret pact to help the victim and his girlfriend Leanne. Set in Glasgow at the time of the Orange Order walks, Divided City is a gripping tale about two boys and how ...
In Geography for the Lost, travelling poems speak from different parts of the world and different moments in time, but always 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 here - from a Roman housewife to a Chinese bar-owner in Berlin or an Argentine DJ - are of the heartsick, the culturally jet-lagged, people from photographs, the 'tenants' of lives, cities and destinies. This is what we all are, have been, or will be. Colourful, haunting, funny, bitter-sweet, the poems in Geography for the Lost mirror the restlessness of the human condition in Kassabova's best book yet.