Elixir

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Date: Saturday 17th February 2024 Location: Online
Start time: 5:30pm End time: 7:30pm Type: Webinar

Kapka will deliver a talk about her book, ‘Elixir’, before discussing its themes with Dominique Keeling. Elixir is the third in a quartet of novels, each of which delves into a particular region of the Southern Balkans. These are ancient realms of rich nature-culture ecologies, scarred by political trauma. Through intimate personal stories and multiple narratives, she explores collective and ancestral pain against the backdrop of a natural wilderness – how humans, plants and animals are psychically and materially bound in an alchemical process that unfolds continuously. As the early eco-psychologists said: The mind is nature, nature – the mind.

Elixir is an exploration of the symbiotic relationship between people, place and plants along the Mesta River and a search for a cure to what ails us in the Anthropocene.

Please note that booking for all webinars closes two hours before the advertised start time.

Speaker: Kapka Kassabova

Kapka Kassabova is a writer of narrative prose and poetry. She was born in Bulgaria before emigrating with her family to New Zealand at the age of nineteen. She studied French and Russian literature at Otago University and English Literature and Creative Writing at Victoria University of Wellington. She has written poetry since early childhood. In 2005 she emigrated to Edinburgh and since 2011 has lived by the Beauly River in the Highlands of Scotland. In her work, she is drawn to geographical and psychological margins and historical confluences where myth meets linear time. She is the author of poetry collections and novels, and the winner of numerous awards. Her books are translated into twenty languages.