Téa Obreht

Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade in 1985, in what was then Yugoslavia. She spent part of her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt and has lived in the United States since she was twelve. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Harper's, and The New Yorker later named her one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty.

Her novels sit where history meets folktale. The Tiger's Wife draws on myth, village life and wartime in the former Yugoslavia, and at its heart is the bond between a granddaughter and her grandfather. Inland moves to the American West of the nineteenth century. The Morningside, published in 2024, is a magical-realist story set in a dystopian future. Her fourth novel, Sunrise, takes place in a Wyoming ghost town and moves between 1902, 2003 and 2024. The settings change, but the habit stays: a place's legends are treated as seriously as its documented past.

The Tiger's Wife was her debut. It won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a National Book Award finalist. Inland later won the Southwest Book Award and the Ballard Prize.

The book on WebToTell is a different kind of entry. Obreht did not write Animal Farm. She contributed the new introduction to its 75th Anniversary Edition, alongside Russell Baker's piece. If that introduction made you curious about her own work, start with The Tiger's Wife, which is where her voice first appeared in full. Readers who like Westerns that distrust their own legends should go to Inland. Sunrise, her newest, follows similar ground in Wyoming.