Kapka Kassabova grew up in Sofia. Since 1990 she has lived in England, France, Germany and New Zealand. She has published two previous collections, as well as two novels with Penguin: Reconnaissance and Love in the Land of Midas.

About Someone Else's Life:

"In the suitcase that seh has mentally lived out of since she was a little girl, Kapka Kassabove has brought the turbulent memories of 20th century European history with her to New Zealand, where she recollects bad dreams in comparative tranquility, and alwasy with the phrasing of a born musician. If her finely pitched lyricism is the first thing that strikes you, the second is the richness of sympathy that lies behind it. As if she owed her gifts and blessings to them, she speaks for the generations before her whose lives were ruined. The result is a truly international picture of what it means to be young and sensitive in the modern world. In a short life, she has already established a unique literary identity."
—Clive James

"Someone else's life tells with surpreme clarity and fearless candor what it means to be adrift in the last years of the 20th centurya and the first of the 21st; it is a book of perpetual exile, of endless comings and goings, in a world that ofers neither stability, nor salvation. Still, the very intelligence of this — skeptical, riveting, passionate — suggests that there may be an answer to the uncertainty that is everywhere around us."
—Mark Strand