About the Author

Kapka Kassabova is a prizewinning writer of narrative non-fiction. Her recent Balkan quartet includes Anima (2024), Elixir (2023), To the Lake (2020) and Border (2017). Her awards include a British Academy prize, the Scottish Book of the Year, the Stanford-Dolman Travel Book of the Year, the Highland Book Prize, the Prix Nicolas-Bouvier, the Prix du Meilleur Livre tranger, and the Premio Mazzotti. Kassabova grew up in Sofia, Bulgaria, and migrated to New Zealand before settling in Scotland twenty years ago. She lives by a Highland river.

Reviews

The mark of a good book is that it changes you. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Nan Shepherd, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Jay Griffiths have all wielded that power over me, but I’ve rarely been so aware of an internal change being wrought, word by word, as I have these past days immersed in Kapka Kassabova’s alchemical prose. I fancy she had me under her spell from page one
*Guardian, *Book of Day**

Her ability to bring out the best in her subjects is born of a genuine horror at the unsustainability of the ways we live... 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... Elixir provides a glorious cycle of stories and personal testimonies.
*Spectator*

Subtle prose that mingles empathy with perspective.
*Economist*

Humanity glitters under her gaze in all its facets. Her prose is spectacularly good and her storytelling is a joy.
*Philip Marsden, author of Rising Ground*

A laudable attempt to record an endangered region and a disappearing way of life.
*Times Literary Supplement*

Exceptional.
*BBC Wildlife*

This is a book to make you feel.
*Scotsman*

In her captivating latest, Kassabova transports us to the Mesta River in her native Bulgaria... Kassabova finds hope that this ancient knowledge still has the power to heal us.
*Bookseller, *Editor's Choice**

Extraordinary... She allows her book to grow and swell, like a symphony, expanding and deepening its themes until the traditional wisdom and life of the mountain envelopes you entirely. Rather like a spell, in fact.
*Country Life*