ANIMA, a wild pastoral
“It’s not the bear behind the hut or the wolves at the perimeter. It’s not the storm or the cold. It’s the void. I am inside a void and there is a void inside me.”
“We are a monoculture. Like those fields of single crops that go on for miles. The single crop is Anthropos. We have built a flat, boring world for ourselves on top of the original one.”
Premio Special Gambrinus Mazzotti
Featured on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week
Guardian Summer Reads 2024
ELIXIR
“He was the closest I’d met to a mining gnome. He lived inside the fissures of the earth and the basements of the psyche. He was part of an underground web of soil-munchers, gold-miners, pentacle exchangers, tomb raiders, skull-duggers, conspiracy-spinners and like a djinn, he guarded the edges of things and could hurt you when disturbed. He did not make the world a better place. Yet he was integral to the valley’s ecology of meaning. “
Longlisted for the Wainright Prize for Conservation
Shortlisted for the Highland Book Prize
The Bookseller Editor’s Choice
Featured on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week
TO THE LAKE
“Ohrid made you feel the weight of time, even on a peaceful evening like this, with only the screech of cicadas and the shuffle of old women in slippers.”
Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger 2021/ Best Foreign Book of Non-Fiction, winner
The Highland Book Prize, shortlisted
BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, February 2020
Best Books of 2020 in The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, The Herald, The Tablet, and The Booksellers’ magazine
BORDER
“People die crossing borders, and sometimes just being near them. The lucky ones are reborn on the other side.”
2020 Prix Nicolas Bouvier in France, winner
2020 Prix européen du livre, special mention of the jury
2020 Angelus Central European Literary Prize in Poland, shortlisted
2018 British Academy Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, winner
2018 Highland Book Prize, winner
2017 Edward Stanford Dolman Book of the Year, winner
2017 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year, winner
The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing, shortlisted
Duff Cooper Prize for Non-Fiction, shortlisted
2018 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, shortlisted
The Baillie-Gifford Prize, shortlisted
The National Book Critics Circle Awards, US, shortlisted
The Gordon Burn Prize, shortlisted
TWELVE MINUTES OF LOVE: a tango story
Granta UK, 2011
‘An exquisitely crafted blending of travelogue, memoir, dance history and some seriously good writing on the human condition, it delves deep into the obsessive nature of tango and vividly depicts a world full of beauty and heartbreak, love and loss.’ The Independent
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STREET WITHOUT A NAME
Granta UK, 2008
“Not many books on the travel shelves have the force of revelation, but this one does. Kapka Kassabova leads us into a country most of us have hardly read about with an elegant assurance, an acid wit and a heart-rending precision that can make you see the world quite differently. This book is a treasure.” Pico Iyer
VILLA PACIFICA
Alma UK, Penguin NZ, 2011. Bulgarian and Mexican editions.
‘The exoticism here is reminiscent of Somerset Maugham’s Borneo Stories and the quasi-hallucinogenic experiences of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.’ The Times Literary Supplement
RECONNAISSANCE
Penguin NZ, 1999. Israeli and Japanese editions.
Winner of the 2000 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel in South-East Asia and the Pacific. Short-listed for 1999 Montana Book Awards for Best First Novel.
Kapka Kassabova 