Kapka Kassabova is a prize-winning writer of non-fiction and poetry. Her recent Balkan quartet includes Anima (2024), Elixir (2023), To the Lake (2020) and Border (2017). Border won a British Academy Prize, the Scottish Book of the Year, Stanford-Dolman Travel Book of the Year, the Highland Book Prize and the Prix Nicholas Bouvier. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The French edition of To the Lake won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (non-fiction). Kassabova grew up in Sofia, Bulgaria, and studied in New Zealand. Today she lives by a river in the Scottish Highlands.
Her ability to bring out the best in her subjects is born of a genuine horror at the unsustainability of the ways we live and the toll they are taking on places such as the Mesta valley. But Elixir is not a lecture ... Like the forests and fells it inhabits, it is by turns dark and mysterious and beautiful. Ecologically minded writing can often tell too much and show too little, but Kassabova sensibly lets the landscape and locals do the talking. * Financial Times * Uplifting and beautifully written... Kassabova's book...provide[s] a glorious cycle of stories and personal testimonies. * Spectator * Subtle prose that mingles empathy with perspective. * Economist * A laudable attempt to record an endangered region and a disappearing way of life. * Times Literary Supplement * Exceptional. * BBC Wildlife *