Téa Obreht, born Tea Bajraktarević, is an American novelist. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading.
Background
Ethnicity:
Téa Obreht's father is a Bosniak, while her grandfather, a Slovene of German origin, and her grandmother, a Bosniak.
Téa Obreht was born on September 30, 1985, in Belgrade, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (now Serbia), the only child of a single mother, Maja, while her father, a Bosniak, was "never part of the picture." Because of her lack of a father figure, she was close to her maternal grandparents, especially to her grandfather Štefan (a Roman Catholic from Slovenia) and to her grandmother, Zahida (a Muslim from Bosnia).
When civil war broke out in 1992, the family moved first to Cyprus and then to Cairo. In 1997, when the war ended, her grandparents returned to Belgrade, but she and her mother immigrated to the United States, first living outside Atlanta and then settling in Palo Alto, south of San Francisco in California.
Education
After graduating from the University of Southern California, Obreht received her Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction from the creative writing program at Cornell University in 2009.
Career
Téa Obreht's first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2010. 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.
Her short story, The Laugh, was published in The Atlantic and was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2010. She has also published nonfiction about vampire hunting in Harper’s.
In October 2011, Téa Obreht was a special guest at a charity lunch organized by Lifeline Humanitarian Organization in New York under the patronage of Her Royal Highness Princess Katherine Karađorđević, to aid orphaned children in Serbia. Obreht participated by auctioning off a private lecture by her at a book club.
On August 13, 2019, Obreht's second book, Inland, will be released. This is a sweeping story set in the lawless, drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893.
Téa Obreht currently lives in New York City and teaches at Hunter College.