Elizabeth Kostova

Elizabeth Kostova is an American novelist born in 1964 in New London, Connecticut, who earned a bachelor's degree from Yale and an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2003. Her debut novel, The Historian (2005), a work of historical and gothic fiction built around the Dracula legend, became the first debut novel to reach number one on the New York Times bestseller list and was, at the time, the fastest-selling hardback debut in American publishing history; Little, Brown paid an unusually large advance for an unknown author, and Sony purchased the film rights. The book won the 2006 Book Sense Book of the Year for adult fiction, a 2005 Quill Award for Debut Author of the Year, and the 2006 Lord Ruthven Award. Kostova has since published The Swan Thieves and The Shadow Land, and in 2007 founded the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation to support Bulgarian literature.