Téa Obreht (born Tea Bajraktarević; 30 September 1985) is a Serbian-American novelist.[1][2][3]

Téa Obreht
Obreht at Pen America/Free Expression Literature, May 2014.
Born	Tea Bajraktarević (1985-09-30) 30 September 1985 (age 36) Belgrade, SR Serbia, SFR Yugoslavia
Occupation	Fiction writer
Genre	Novels, short stories
Notable works	The Tiger's Wife
Notable awards	Orange Prize 2011
Website
teaobreht.com

Her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife,[4][5] won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist.[6] Obreht was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree[6] and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty.[7] Her second novel, Inland, was released in 2019.

Biography

Téa Obreht was born Tea Bajraktarević in the autumn of 1985, in Belgrade, SR Serbia, SFR Yugoslavia, the only child of a single mother, Maja Obreht,[8][9] while her father, a Bosniak,[10] was "never part of the picture".[9]

She was close to her maternal grandparents, especially to her grandfather Štefan Obreht,[8][9] a Roman Catholic Slovene of German origin,[9] and to her grandmother, Zahida, a Muslim Bosniak.[8] When the Yugoslav Wars started in the early 1990s, there was no fighting in her home town of Belgrade or in Serbia, but there was concern due to her grandparents' religions, as Roman Catholicism and Islam were closely associated with Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, respectively, which was a serious distinction at the time of the war.[8] They didn't flee immediately,[8] but decided to move to Cyprus for precautionary reasons when her mother found a job there.[8] Eighteen months later they moved to Cairo, Egypt, guided by her grandfather's job as an aviation engineer.

Her grandparents permanently returned to Belgrade in 1997, while she and her mother settled in the United States, first in Atlanta, where they joined extended family,[8] and later in Palo Alto, California,[10][11] where her mother was remarried[8] to a Serbian Orthodox man.[12] Obreht's grandfather died in 2006, and on his deathbed asked her to write under his surname, Obreht.[8][9][10] She later decided to change her last name legally as well.[8]

After graduating from the University of Southern California,[13] Obreht received a MFA in fiction from the creative writing program at Cornell University in 2009.[14] She currently serves as the Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos.[15] She is married to writer Dan Sheehan.[16]

Obreht's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story, Harpers, The New York Times and The Guardian, and in anthologies The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading.[17][18]

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.[19]

In October 2011, Obreht was a special guest at a charity lunch organized by Lifeline Humanitarian Organization in New York under the patronage of Katherine, Crown Princess of Yugoslavia, to aid orphaned children in Serbia. Obreht participated by auctioning off a private lecture by her at a book club.[20][21]

Obreht's latest novel, Inland, was released in August 2019.[22] It was shortlisted for the 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize.[23]

Books

The Tiger's Wife (2010)

The Tiger's Wife was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2010.[24] 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,[25] and excerpted in The New Yorker in June 2009.[26] 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".[27] Late in 2011 she was a finalist for that year's U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.[28]

Inland (2019)

Inland was published on August 13, 2019 by Random House. The novel is set in the Arizona Territory in the 1800s.[29][30]

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (April 2017)

Novels

• Obreht, Téa (2011). The Tiger's Wife. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
• Obreht, Téa (2019). Inland. New York: Random House.

Short stories

• "The Laugh", The Atlantic, Fiction Issue (August 2009)
• "The Sentry", The Guardian, Summer Short Story Special (Summer 2010)
• "Blue Water Djinn", The New Yorker (August 2, 2010)
• "Blue Water Djinn", 20 Under 40: Stories from the New Yorker, edited by Deborah Treisman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010, pp. 285–305
• "Items Awaiting Protective Enclosure", Zoetrope: All-Story (Spring 2017)

Essays and reporting

• "Twilight of The Vampires: Hunting the Real-Life Undead", Harper's Magazine (November 2010)
• "American Idol: Reason to Believe", Vogue (May 2012)
• Obreht, Téa (December 19–26, 2016). "David Attenborough". Visionaries. The New Yorker. Vol. 92, no. 42. p. 104.[31]

References

External links

• 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 Authorities, with 2 catalog records (one title)

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[ru] Обрехт, Теа