Elizabeth Kostova

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Kostova in 2007

Elizabeth Johnson Kostova (born December 26, 1964 in New London (Connecticut) ) is an American writer .

Life

Elizabeth Johnson grew up in Knoxville , Tennessee , and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in British Studies from Yale University . Kostova also earned a Masters of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan . In 1989 she went to Bulgaria for a year to do research on traditional folk music. In Bulgaria Kostova met her future husband, the lecturer Georgi Kostov.

The two returned to the United States , where Georgi Kostov found a job at the University of Michigan . There Kostova passed her master's degree in creative writing and won the Hopwood Award for the Novel-in-Progress . She worked on her debut novel for ten years: The Historian (OT: The Historian ).

The book was published in 2005 by Little Brown Verlag, which acquired the publication rights in an auction for US $ 2 million, and immediately reached number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list .

Kostova's second novel, The Swan Thieves , was published in January 2010.

Debut novel

The vampire novel the historian combines historical and popular traditions to the figure of the Romanian prince Vlad III. Drăculea (Dracula) with the search of a young woman for her missing father, who in turn had researched the Dracula legend for a long time. The novel stands in the tradition of magical realism in which fiction and reality converge and ultimately interweave, so that the eventual entry of Dracula into the real world of the narrator rounds off the novel.

The American producer Douglas Wick is planning a film adaptation of the novel, the script is by Brad Kane. The director and cast have not yet been announced.

reception

On the first day of sale in the US, more copies of the historian sold as of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code ( The Da Vinci Code ).

The first work was largely positively received by public literary criticism. In his review of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, however, Peter Körte criticized the lack of timing and the textbook use of topoi .

For the first chapter of The Historian , Kostova received the Hopwood Award for Creative Writing .

In her review of Kostova's second novel The Swan Thieves in the Washington Post, Donna Rifkind criticized that it, like The Historian, was too long for the actual content and that the author continued to have problems, although she had succeeded in creating the characters this time I have to give each figure its own voice.

Works

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Vampire Code . The Age, August 8, 2005
  2. www.cinematical.com Report dated June 15, 2007
  3. Bigger Than Dan Brown Portrait of the author and short review by Gary Younge in: The Guardian, July 18, 2005
  4. How to stake a novel, review by Peter Körte in FAZ from September 2, 2005
  5. Vita Elizabeth Kostova ( Memento of the original from October 8, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Homepage PhantastikCouch , online magazine for fantastic literature @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.phantastik-couch.de
  6. Review by Donna Rifkind in the Washington Post, Jan. 12, 2010