Elizabeth Kostova

Elizabeth Kostova is an American author whose debut novel The Historian — a vampire story structured as layers of nested narrative about Vlad the Impaler — became an international bestseller and one of the most successful literary horror novels of its decade.

Elizabeth Kostova spent ten years writing The Historian (2005), her debut novel, and it became one of the most successful first novels of the 2000s — Hachette paid a then-record advance for it, and it spent weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. The novel is a vampire story, but unusually one in which the horror is archival and historical: an unnamed narrator discovers her father’s papers and begins investigating the legend of Vlad the Impaler, the fifteenth-century Wallachian ruler who became associated with the Dracula legend.

The narrative unfolds across three generations and multiple countries, structured as letters and documents discovered nested within each other — a form drawn from nineteenth-century epistolary fiction. The book is dense with historical and geographical detail about Eastern Europe, Istanbul, and the Balkans, and its particular quality is the sense of dread that accumulates through scholarship rather than through supernatural set-pieces. Kostova uses the vampire legend as a vehicle for exploring the persistence of evil through institutions and records.

The Swan Thieves (2010), her second novel, is set in the present and involves a psychiatrist investigating the obsession of a painter who attacked a painting at the National Gallery. It received more mixed reviews than The Historian — critics felt the psychological mystery was less gripping than the historical vampire narrative — but found its audience among readers who wanted literary fiction with a mystery structure. Kostova founded the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation to support Bulgarian writers and translators.