Kapka Kassabova was born in 1973 and grew up in Bulgaria until she was 16. Her family emigrated first to Britain, then to New Zealand where she lived until 2004. She now lives in the Scottish Highlands as a cultural mongrel working on a simplified version of her East European-Kiwi-Scots accent. She has published two poetry collections with Bloodaxe in the UK, Someone else’s life (2003), including work from two collections published in New Zealand as well as new poems, and Geography for the lost (2007). She has also published three novels, Reconnaissance (Penguin NZ, 1999), winner of the 2000 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Asia-Pacific, Love in the Land of Midas (Penguin NZ, 2001) and Villa Pacifica (Alma Books, 2010), and two memoirs, Street Without a Name (Portobello, 2008), a coming of age story at the end of Communism, and Twelve Minutes of Love: a tango story (Portobello, 2011).