Join The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations between Cash and his author friends as they discuss how North Carolina inspires them on the Our State Book Club podcast.
When Elizabeth Kostova was 7 years old, her father took their family to Slovenia after receiving a Fulbright scholarship to teach urban and regional planning. It was there, against the backdrop of medieval architecture, that the legend of Dracula first sank its teeth into Kostova.
While she and her two younger siblings were fascinated by sights like the Ljubljana Castle on its rocky perch above the city and the Dragon Bridge’s large, looming statues, the children sometimes grew restless. In an effort to distract them, Kostova’s father began telling them stories that would change her life.
“He would sit us down and tell us Dracula tales,” Kostova says. Though these were “watered-down” versions, they still left Kostova and her sisters “deliciously creeped out.”
“Years later, I realized his stories had been based on the wonderful movies he’d grown up with in the 1940s,” she says. “His stories were Victorian and Gothic, but they were inspired by the black-and-white Bela Lugosi films.”
Not long after returning home to the United States, Kostova came across an old copy of Bram Stoker’s 1897 masterpiece, Dracula, on her parents’ bookshelf. She began reading the original in secret and remembers feeling both disturbed and fascinated. The young Kostova was unaware that she would return to the legend decades later.
After graduating from Yale, she spent time traveling, eventually meeting her husband, Georgi Kostov, in Bulgaria in the late 1980s while she was studying traditional Eastern European music. The couple eventually moved to Asheville — where Kostova’s family had settled in the late 1800s — and she began writing fiction. One day, while hiking the rigorous Yellow Mountain Trail near Cashiers, Kostova had a vision of the novel that would eventually make her career.
illustration by Andrea Cheung
“We came to the top of the mountain, and the view reminded me of the Balkans,” she says. “I suddenly remembered being a child in Slovenia and hearing my father’s stories about Dracula.” There, amid the beautiful, expansive views, Kostova discovered the basis for a novel. She took seven pages of notes while on the peak and began writing the novel the following week.
Kostova continued to work on the story over the next 10 years, including the time she spent in the University of Michigan’s MFA program. There, her novel-in-progress won the prestigious Hopwood Award, joining the ranks of writers like Robert Hayden, Arthur Miller, and Mary Gaitskill.
The Historian was published in 2005 and tells the story of a family of historians who find themselves following the tale of — and the real — Dracula. It was not just a literary historical novel: The book itself made history. It was the first debut novel to appear at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list upon its release.
In 2010, Kostova published her second novel, The Swan Thieves, which follows a psychiatrist who accepts a troubled, brilliant painter as his patient. In 2017, she released another novel, The Shadow Land, about a woman who travels to Bulgaria in the wake of her brother’s death and finds herself embroiled in a tragic mystery.
Although her fiction regularly ventures into old-world Europe, Kostova has remained in Asheville, where she and her husband raised three children. She’s working on a new novel, too, often holed up at a local coffee shop to write alongside fellow author and Asheville resident Denise Kiernan. The girl who once read historical fiction in secret is now making literary history.
The 2025-26 Elon University Speaker Series brings purposeful voices to the forefront. Hear from Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci and Army intelligence officer Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Robert P. Ashley, Jr., as they explore what drives leaders to make a difference.
photograph by Matt Hulsman
The Historian opens in the early 1970s, when a young woman discovers a mysterious ancient book with the imprint of a dragon in her father’s study. After much prompting, her father regales her with the story of how the book came into his possession, beginning with the strange, bloody disappearance of his former professor, a man who had devoted his life to the study of the original Dracula. The Historian is a cross-continental Gothic mystery shrouded in horror and old-world romance that reveals the lengths to which our young narrator will go to understand her family’s past and how it might collide with Dracula. It reminds us that knowledge can have consequences and that history is always with us.
More to Explore: Hear from Elizabeth Kostova in new episodes out October 7 and 21. Listen at ourstate.com/podcasts.
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