Kapka Kassabova Livres

A guide that is packed with useful information, accompanied by colour photographs, charts and maps for the first-time traveller who wants to experience the major highlights that Delhi, Jaipur and Agra has to offer.

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.

Set in the valley of the Mesta, one of the oldest inhabited river valleys in Europe and a nexus for wild plant gatherers, Elixir is an unforgettable exploration of the deep connections between people, plants and placeOver several seasons, Kassabova spends time with the people of this magical region. She meets women and men who work in a long lineage of foragers, healers and mystics. She learns about wild plants and the ancient practice of herbalism, and experiences a symbiotic system where nature and culture have blended for thousands of years. Through her captivating encounters we come to feel the devastating weight of the ecological and cultural disinheritance that the people of this valley have suffered. Yet, in her search for elixir, she also finds reasons for hope. The people of the valley are keepers of a rare knowledge, not only of mountain plants and their properties, but also of how to transform collective suffering into healing.Immersive and enthralling, at its heart Elixir is a search for a cure to what ails us in the Anthropocene. It is an urgent call to rethink how we live - in relation to one another, to the Earth and to the cosmos.

Kapka Kassabova reist ins alte Thrakien, dorthin, wo Bulgarien, Griechenland und die Türkei aufeinandertreffen - und entdeckt verborgene Welten und faszinierende Menschen

From the celebrated author of Border, here is a portrait of an ancient but little-understood corner of Balkans, and a personal reckoning with the past.

Second collection by Kapka Kassabova, a young Bulgarian emigre poet who writes in English but with a European imagination. Her well-travelled poems speak from different parts of the world and different moments of history.

In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the "Red Riviera" on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whose barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the citizens of the totalitarian regime. Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, myth and legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, botanists, and border guards populate the book. There are also the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian tombs, and the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism, is never far off.

To the uninitiated, tango is just a dance. To the true tanguero, it is a way of life - and it has been Kapka's way of life for a decade. Here, in sparkling, spring-heeled prose, Kapka takes us inside the esoteric world of the milonga to tell the story of tango, from its Afro roots to its sequined celebrities and back.

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.

Kassabova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and grew up under the drab, muddy, grey mantle of one of communism’s most mindlessly authoritarian regimes. Escaping with her family as soon as possible after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, she lived in Britain, New Zealand, and Argentina, and several other places. But when Bulgaria was formally inducted to the European Union she decided it was time to return to the home she had spent most of her life trying to escape. What she found was a country languishing under the strain of transition. This two-part memoir of Kapka’s childhood and return explains life on the other side of the Iron Curtain.