ABSTRACT
Kapka Kassabova (b. 1973) is a Bulgarian who, after living in her homeland, England, France, and Germany, settled in New Zealand and began writing in English. Already at an early age for an author who chose as her literary language one that she had learned only in young adulthood, and not at school, she wrote two novels and two books of poetry, All Roads Lead to the Sea (1997) and Dismemberment (1998). The well-received Someone Else’s Life (2003) then included revised poems from these first two collections, as well as twenty-one new pieces. And in 2007, she published Geography for the Lost, gathering forty-eight new poems and comprising “Skipping over Invisible Borders,” a prose account of her childhood in communist Bulgaria, her multilingualism, and her family’s expatriations, first to England, then to New Zealand. She tells the story of how she, like Joseph Conrad, might more logically have decided to write in the French that she had mastered at her Sofia-based French lycée. Kassabova is one of several writers from the Eastern European Communist Bloc countries who, in the postwar decades leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and sometimes even thereafter, chose or were obliged—in one way or another—to exchange a mother tongue for a different, literary one, usually French or English. The full story of this diaspora remains to be told.
