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
character influence
I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.
thinking young mythology
I think the mythology of death really ran away with me when I was very young.
mean dark matter
I like dark subject matter. I'm not sure what that means about me!
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.
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.
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.
hate fighting attachment
When your fight has purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent—it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling—when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event—there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.
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.
moving two space
In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year.