Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
How to pronounce Téa Obreht: Tay-uh Ah-bret
Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, and grew up in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States. Her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and an international bestseller. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. She was the recipient of the Rona Jaffe fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She lives in New York with her husband, and teaches at Hunter College.
Téa Obreht's website
This bio was last updated on 07/22/2019. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
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 ...
Born in Peru and raised in Chile, Isabel Allende is the author of a number of bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, Paula, and In the Midst of Winter. ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Tiger's Wife
Try:
In the Midst of Winter
by Isabel Allende
Hodgkinson has an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. After the MA, she and her husband, with our two young daughters, upped sticks and bought a property in south west France. The first few years were ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Tiger's Wife
Try:
22 Britannia Road
by Amanda Hodgkinson
We recommend 12 similar authors
Pieces of Blue
by Holly Goldberg Sloan
A hilarious and heartfelt novel for fans of Maria Semple and Emma Straub.
30 Copies to Give Away!
A funny and poignant debut novel that skewers billionaire-funded space travel in a love story of interplanetary proportions.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
