Someone else's life

by Kapka Kassabova

Kapka Kassabova is a young Bulgarian émigré poet who writes in English but with a European imagination. In Someone else’s life, her first poetry collection to be published in the UK, she explores the emotional and spiritual territory of the traveller and the dispossessed, the spaces between memory and being, exploration and doubt, desire and loss.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2003

About the author

Kapka Kassabova was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria in the 1970s and 1980s. Her family emigrated to New Zealand just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and she spent her late teens and twenties in New Zealand where she studied French Literature, and published two poetry collections and the Commonwealth-Writers Prize-winner for debut fiction in Asia-Pacific, Reconnaissance.

In 2004, Kapka moved to Scotland and published Street Without a Name (Portobello, 2008). It is a story of the last Communist childhood and a journey across post-communist Bulgaria. It was short-listed for the Dolman Travel Book Award.

The music memoir Twelve Minutes of Love (Portobello 2011), a tale of Argentine tango, obsession and the search for home, was short-listed for the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards.

Villa Pacifica (Alma Books 2011), a novel with an equatorial setting, came out at the same time.

Border: a journey to the edge of Europe (2017 Granta/ Greywolf) is an exploration of Europe's remotest border region.

Her essays and articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Vogue, The Sunday Times, The Scottish Review of Books, The NZ Listener, The New Statesman, and 1843 Magazine.

Reviews

[Immi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tried my hand at poetry, realised this wasn’t for me hahaha

Did love the line: “our children know all the songs, all the shows, all the jokes, they try to learn the memories too”

[Moushumi Ghosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kassabova's poetry is infused with a deep sense of longing. It is both a longing for a lost past and an uncertain future. It's like the present is the best place only because one can articulate this longing. She writes of a Communist life left behind and the New Zealand life she embraced but fundamentally it is about the human condition where pain, loss, sadness rule and sometimes a few sparks of light and happiness appear. Kapka Kassabova is a poet to watch out for.

[Sevim · Rating 5 out of 5]

'To spot a hooded figure on the hill in a yellow raincoat,
in a flashback of self-recognition.
To lie, then stand and fall into the deep storm
from a great height, emerging on the other side of here.
To sleep and when you wake up, to remember it
as something that did not exist, and that will never be again.
This is why we leave.'

[Apina_lukee_kirjoja · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poems of displacement, of figuring out how to belong. Very relatable. About three-quarters of them should have the last line cut out.

[Pema Dao · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite book of poetry. A true migrant's book.