Elizabeth Kostova was born Elizabeth Johnson in New London, Connecticut, on August 4, 1964. According to Julie Wheelwright in the Independent (U.K.), Kostova's parents, Eleanor and David Johnson, were academics who taught at universities in New York, Indiana, Tennessee, and North Carolina. When she was seven, the author's father, an urban planning professor, was transferred to the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana. The Eastern European setting, as well as trips to Vienna and Venice, made quite an impression on her. "It was the formative experience of my childhood," Kostova told Wheelwright. She told Anne Sanow of Publisher's Weekly, "We traveled around and saw beautiful places, and at one point [my father] he began to tell me a wonderfully creepy Dracula story."

Her childhood travels to Eastern Europe informed Kostova's decision to study Slavonic music after graduating from Yale University in 1988. She went to Bulgaria in 1989 on a postgraduate...