By the lake
Philipp Blom in conversation with Kapka Kassabova
By the lake
Journey to men ancestors in war and peace
Kapka Kassabova follows in her family's footsteps at Lake Ohrid. As in The last frontier (Zsolnay, 2018) she travels in her new book, By the lake, on their way to the East and into their own past.
Fishermen, peddlers, widows, orphans - victims, perpetrators and those who have managed to free themselves from the entanglements. The conflicts and tragedies of nation states in the corner of Europe that Kapka Kassabova takes us to become visible as if through a magnifying glass: the area around Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa, divided between North Macedonia, Albania and Greece. It is linked to her own family history, and so the exploration of a beautiful region, its history and political upheavals becomes a journey into her own past. Kassabova knows how to reveal the connections between topography and biography and how to make people tell stories whose fates reflect the turmoil of the centuries.
Kapka Kassabova was born in Sofia in 1973 and now lives in the Scottish Highlands. She writes for, among others The Sunday Times, The Guardian and Vogue. She was awarded the British Academy's Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for The Last Frontier (Zsolnay 2018). At the lake was published by Zsolnay in March 2021 in the translation by Brigitte Hilzensauer. .
Philipp Blom lives as a writer and historian in Vienna and writes regularly for international magazines and newspapers.
Kapka Kassabova:
AM SEE. Travelling to my ancestors in war and peace
ISBN: 978-3-552-07245-9, 416 pages, €26.80; 2021, Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Granta
In co-operation with Zsolnay-Verlag