Geography for the Lost
Author(s): Kapka Kassabova
Kapka Kassabova is 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, but they always speak of the many ways to be lost and disoriented: in a place, in the past, in fear, in love, 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 heart-sick, 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. Kapka Kassbova's Someone else's life (2003) was widely acclaimed: 'A book of striking originality in which the poet speaks for those who have been uprooted or dispossessed by, mostly European, history. Always evocative, Kassabova memorialises lives in transit' - Gerry Smyth, Irish Times . 'Kassabova's achievement is to make the emigre life a metaphor inclusive of more general alienation...The evidence of a major talent is unmistakable' - Chris Miller, PN Review . 'This much-travelled volume is always, even in several striking love poems, a record of alienation from the valley strewn with garbage and roses of her homeland. This doubled sensibility is at once new and accomplished, direct and complex' - Fiona Sampson, Poetry Review . 'Someone else's life tells with supreme clarity and fearless candor what it means to be adrift in the last years of the 20th century and the rest of the 21st; it is a book of perpetual exile, of endless comings and goings, in a world that offers neither stability, nor salvation. Still, the very intelligence of this book - skeptical, riveting, passionate - suggests that there may be an answer to the uncertainty that is everywhere around us' - Mark Strand.
Product Information
Kapka Kassabova describes herself as 'a poet, travel writer, novelist, and professionally displaced person'. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1973 she emigrated as a young adult to New Zealand, where she studied French and linguistics and subsequently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, under the directorship of Bill Manhire. Since moving to New Zealand she has also lived in France, Germany, England and, currently, Scotland. 'Although I find myself living in Britain at the moment, New Zealand remains my permanent base and the place which transformed me from a migrant into a traveller, from a double citizen into a cultural hybrid.' Kassabova has been writing poems since she was 8 years old. As a high school student in Sofia she was a member of the young writers' club and had work published in the leading literary journal Mother Tongue. She began writing in English, her fourth language, when she was 19 and says she couldn't now write in any other language. She has written three previous collections of poetry All Roads Lead to the Sea (AUP, 1997), Dismemberment (AUP, 2000) and Someone Else's Life (AUP/Bloodaxe, 2003), two acclaimed novels, travel guides and many pieces of travel journalism. Kassabova has received awards for her writing across all her genres: her first collection of poems, All Roads Lead to the Sea won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for the First Best Book of Poetry; her first novel Reconnaissance won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in the South-East Asia?Pacific Region and was shortlisted in the Montana NZ Books Awards; she won the 2002 Cathay Pacific NZ Travel Writer of the Year Award. She has also won many awards including a scholarship for original French poetry and French studies, the 1999 Buddle Finlay Sargeson Literary Fellowship, the 2002/2003 CNZ/DAAD Berlin Residency and Arts Council grants in 2004 (British; Literature) and 2005 (Scottish; Travel). Kassabova plans to return to New Zealand in May 2007 to promote Geography for the Lost and to make author appearances, including at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival.
General Fields
- :
- : Auckland University Press
- : Auckland University Press
- : 0.4
- : 01 April 2007
- : 214mm X 140mm
- : New Zealand
- : books
Special Fields
- : Kapka Kassabova
- : Paperback
- : 1st Edition
- : en
- : 821/.914
- : very good
- : 80
- : Poetry texts & anthologies
