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
grandma writing belgrade
I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma.
egypt cyprus remember
I grew up in Cyprus and Egypt, these fantastic places I remember fondly.
animal trying process
I've always written about animals. I'm still trying to process why that is.
egypt my-family
My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996.
supportive agents faculty
My road to publishing actually came through a colleague who connected me to my agent, and the faculty at Cornell was very supportive.
writing inspire
What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling.
writing focus details
When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.
encouragement taken thinking
Being taken seriously, for a young writer, is a wonderful form of encouragement, but at the same time, I don't think one should ever feel like attempting a kind of artistic endeavor is beyond your scope just because of age or inexperience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.