“Am I here because of you or are you here because of me? you ask as you brush your teeth next to a curly-horned ram who steam-breathes through his nostrils like a dragon. And they answer with their collective mind: We will not abandon you.”
Anima receives Premio speciale Gambrinus Mazzotti
A Bulgarian chef is inspired to a new recipe by Anima
‘Kassabova is an ethnographer in all but name.’ Mountain Research and Development
On ressent, dans ce livre, des émotions quasi téllurique qui nous ramènent à des activités ancestrales nomades quasi oubliées aujourd’ hui. C`est manifique, dur et tendre à la fois. — La Géothèque
Anima is a masterwork and a profound and important book. Kassabova is writing about how we forgot the land and our animals and banished many tribes. In doing so, we lost our soul. Anima is a treasure of nature writing and people writing, a classic in the making for our times — Monique Roffey
At once a dirge and a praise song for pastoralism… At turns muscular, tender, and sublime, this book is one of the finest testimonies for saving the earth, and our humanity, that I’ve ever read. It is unforgettable — Imani Perry
A love letter to the Karakachan way of being — to the shepherds who in a lifetime of walking with the animals circumambulate the world more than once with their combined footfall, and to their guard dogs… it is a love letter to life itself, to the soul of the world coursing through us, the soul beneath the self. — Maria Popova, The Marginalian
Un livre unique. Le témoignage de ces humains à vivre encore de la transhumance est capté avec brio par Kapka Kassabova, dont la langue et le regard sont particulièrement affutés. — La librairie sétoise
Un de ces livres-ovnis dont Kapka Kassabova a le secret. — Librairie arcane
Спасените от Капка Касабова хора и места са достояние вече не само на родната ѝ страна – България, и не само на …втората ѝ родина – Шотландия. Те вече са част от света, от неговата памет, от неговото настояще и бъдеще, от оня „безбрежен като плазма организъм“, частица от който са всички живи същества. Защото нейните книги са родени от съзнанието за принадлежността ни към този космически организъм и за онова, което му дължим. — Mарта Радева, Култура
Анима е не просто книга, а преживяване – пътуване към вътрешните пейзажи на човека и онези кътчета от света, където животът все още се движи с ритъма на стадата, реките и тишината. ICU Publishing
Book of the Year for Monique Roffey (the Guardian), Colin Thubron (the TLS), Jonathan Coe (the New Statesman) and Mark Cocker (the Spectator)
The first pages of Anima in Lithub
Review of Anima in Kultura (in Bulgarian)
An excerpt from Anima in Il libraio (in Italian)
Par le truchement de l’âme – ou presque – des animaux, grâce à une poignée d’individus fidèles aux observances ancestrales, Kapka Kassabova offre une incursion au firmament des origines, alors que se profile notre fin foudroyante. — Antoine Perraud, La Croix
A hymn to our continent’s last shepherds…. The author displays great courage during her summers of near-total isolation and literary daring in arguing for the importance of a non-human realm in the affairs of all Europeans. — Books of the Year/ Mark Cocker
Remarkable… She describes a life by turns gruelling and euphoric. Along with a single shepherd and eight Karakachan dogs – an ancient, imperilled breed – she herds 600 sheep in a region rife with wolves and bears…. Her lyrical evocation of a dying way of life lingers long in the mind. Colin Thubron
A haunting, beautiful book from what feels a darkly enchanted land. Kapka is an extraordinary writer who slips into the skin of a place. Fiercely intelligent, scalpel-sharp, at once romantic and toughly pragmatic: Anima will live with me for a long time — Cal Flyn
Do we have to live in an airless cupboard? This question suffuses Kassabova’s incandescent book, and she poses it relentlessly, in spare, hard prose – prose worthy of the rock and the raven. Despite the crushed knuckles and the drunkenness, the dog bites, the shining eyes of the wolves and the violence of the mountain, humans are bigger there – or, since there is room to stretch, humans can know how big they really are. — Charles Foster, the TLS
An extraordinary work of exploration, both inner and outer. It should be required reading for everyone thinking about our human environment: which is to say, all of us… It puts many things on the line: the author’s personal life, twentieth-century European history, ecological land management and food security, the loss of communities and cultures. Anima is full of the expertise that comes with lived experience… This is belonging-writing… fierce, astonishingly felt… — Fiona Sampson, The Tablet
Roaming across the high pastures, Kassabova sees all our lives with clarity. The ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ worlds become shorthand for a dichotomy at play both in her text and among the wider pastoral community. The book’s vision hinges on the tension between a realm of mountains, animals, sun and sky and an underworld in which most of us experience increasingly interior lives, in a ‘culture of deep fake’ circling inside cyberspace. — Mark Cocker The Spectator
In prose as fierce and beautiful as the landscapes and lifeways it describes, Anima documents the vanishing connection between people, dogs, sheep and wildlife that once tied together much of the ancient world. This book is at once a testament and a mending and a blessing, full of glory and sorrow, and characters both human and animal who you will never forget. —Sy Montgomery
Anima is what happens when an extraordinary writer and dauntless explorer discovers a wild and ancient way of life still, somehow, surviving in Europe’s remotest wilderness. This is a beautiful book of passion and adventure. It asks: who are we, what have we done and how shall we live? Kapka Kassabova stops at nothing, including risking her life, on her quest to see deeply, live fully, to learn, and teach, constantly. She is simply sublime. — Horatio Clare
Mesmerises with its sense of adventure and epic sweep, this is creative nonfiction at its best. ― The Guardian
One of the many questions raised in this masterful book has to do with the nature of the collective but different human pathways and with the very boundaries of the human—the places where we shade into other species…. Kassabova’s prose constantly moves and surprises, unfolding from one image into the next, like the flock. – LA Review of Books
Kassabova’s prose, lyrical but unsentimental, brings you into the heart of this landscape and community, and gently, insistently confronts the reader with questions about what it means to be human, and to be living within a natural world which we persist in violating. – Jonathan Coe, New Statesman Books of the Year
What Kassabova finds is a world that appears at once out of time—bedeviled by wolf attacks and sheep theft—and entirely contemporary, with industrialization and the pull of consumerism threatening to consign the shepherds, and the rare animal breeds they cultivate, to extinction. As Kassabova deepens her relationships with her subjects, she is both confronted and enchanted by their lonely, harshly beautiful existence. — The New Yorker
(c) photos from personal archive
Kapka Kassabova 