Téa Obreht

Téa Obreht was born as Tea Bajraktarević in the autumn of 1985, in Belgrade, SR Serbia, SFR Yugoslavia as the only child of a single mother, Maja, while her father, a Bosniak, was "never part of the picture."^{[citation needed]} Because of her lack of a father figure, she was close to her maternal grandparents, especially to her grandfather Štefan, a Slovene of German origin, and to her grandmother, Zahida, a Bosniak.^{[citation needed]}

After graduating from the University of Southern California,^[6] Obreht received a MFA in fiction from the creative writing program at Cornell University in 2009.^[7]

Obreht's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story, Harper's, The New York Times and The Guardian, and in story anthologies.^[8][9]

Among many influences, Obreht has mentioned in press interviews the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, the Yugoslav Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić, Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, Isak Dinesen, Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, and the children's writer Roald Dahl.^[10]

Obreht is married to the Irish writer Dan Sheehan.

The Tiger's Wife was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2010.^[11] It is a novel set in an unnamed Balkan country, in the present and half a century ago, and features a young doctor's relationship with her grandfather and the stories he tells her. These concern a "deathless man" who meets him several times in different places and never grows old, and a deaf-mute girl from his childhood village who befriends a tiger that escaped from a zoo. It was largely written while she was at Cornell,^[12] and excerpted in The New Yorker in June 2009.^[13] Asked to summarize it by a university journalist, Obreht replied, "It's a family saga that takes place in a fictionalized province of the Balkans. It's about a female narrator and her relationship to her grandfather, who's a doctor. It's a saga about doctors and their relationships to death throughout all these wars in the Balkans."^[5]

The Tiger's Wife won the British Orange Prize for Fiction in 2011 (for 2010 publications). Obreht was the youngest winner of the annual prize (established 1996), which recognizes "excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from throughout the world".^[14] Late in 2011 she was a finalist for that year's U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.^[15]

• Obreht, Téa (2011). The Tiger's Wife. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 9780385343831.
• Obreht, Téa (2019). Inland. New York: Random House. ISBN 9780593132678.
• Obreht, Téa (2024). The Morningside (1st hardcover ed.). New York: Random House. ISBN 9781984855503.

• "The Laugh", The Atlantic, Fiction Issue (August 2009)
• "The Sentry", The Guardian, Summer Short Story Special (Summer 2010)

• "Twilight of The Vampires: Hunting the Real-Life Undead", Harper's Magazine (November 2010)
• Obreht, Téa (December 19–26, 2016). "David Attenborough's Exploration of Nature's Marvels and Brutality". Visionaries. The New Yorker. Vol. 92, no. 42. p. 104.^[16]

• Téa Obreht official website
• Archive at The Atlantic
• Téa Obreht collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• 2011 radio interview (one hour) at The Bat Segundo Show
• Tea Obreht Reads From Her Novel, 'The Tiger's Wife', PBS NewsHour, 1 April 2011
• 2011 Orange Prize Winner, Orange Prize for Fiction, 8 June 2011
• Téa Obreht reading excerpts from The Tiger's Wife on YouTube
• Téa Obreht at Library of Congress, with 2 library catalog records (one title)