Tea Obreht
Tea Obreht
Téa Obrehtis an American novelist. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2011 for The Tiger's Wife, her debut novel...
NationalitySerbian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth30 September 1985
CountrySerbia
running children lying
Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.
egypt cyprus remember
I grew up in Cyprus and Egypt, these fantastic places I remember fondly.
grandma writing belgrade
I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma.
attachment the-end-of-the-day make-or-break
At the end of the day, it's about the reader's attachment to and belief in the magical elements that make or break magical realism.
heart fists sponges
Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?
knowing suffering departure
Suddenness," he says. " You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.
heart body bones
Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.
long want ends
In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.
animal trying process
I've always written about animals. I'm still trying to process why that is.
thinking the-end-of-the-day doe
At the end of the day, despite all the other great things that literature does in society and in a person's life, I think that we read to escape. And I think that place, more than anything, provides that escape quickly, if an author is engaged with the place.
mother black-and-white eight
When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.
block writing brain
When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.
mother writing careers
In terms of people that I know, my grandmother and my mother are huge influences on my writing life because they are both massively supportive and always have been of my career.
yugoslavia grandfather term
For me it was a lot harder to come to terms with the death of my grandfather than it was to come to terms with what's happened to the former Yugoslavia.