Anna Kovatcheva

Anna Kovatcheva (Col ’12) will publish her debut novel, She Made Herself a Monster, with HarperCollins Mariner on February 10, 2026. The novel, set in nineteenth-century Bulgaria, follows a self-proclaimed vampire slayer—in truth, a traveling con artist—who joins forces with a teenage girl to create a monster deadly enough to vanquish their own demons. The novel is a story of female community, fortitude, and rage set against a backdrop of Slavic vampire folklore, inspired in part by the course on Dracula and other representations of the vampire that Kovatcheva took in the Slavic studies department at UVA with Dr. Jan Perkowski in 2009.

Kovatcheva will appear in conversation with Professor John Casteen (Col ’93) at New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville on February 13, 2026, to discuss the book.