Téa Obreht biography

Interview

Two brief interviews with Téa Obreht, discussing her most recent novel, Inland, and her acclaimed debut novel, The Tiger's Wife.

Téa Obreht discusses her latest novel, Inland

Why did you want to write a novel set in the American West?

I grew up a city kid, living with my mother and grandparents on a grey street in Belgrade. America, when I finally arrived here in 1997, was suburban Georgia, and eventually the neat neighborhoods of Northern California. The America of the western novels my grandparents loved seemed impossible to me—a landscape of the imagination, a painted backdrop. The first time I saw the Rocky Mountains in real life, however, I was helplessly lost to them. The landscape, its textures and smells, its sounds and solitude, were all I thought about, all I dreamed of returning to when I left. For someone who had spent a lifetime on the move, this pull felt entirely new. It felt, at last, how I'd always imagined the draw of "home." It seemed inevitable, before I ever arrived at any semblance of story, that whatever book I wrote next would have to grapple with that feeling and its myths, consequences, and illusions.

What did your research for this book involve?

I was deep into the research and drafting of a completely different western when I stumbled onto the substance of Inland by happy accident. Some years ago, an ...