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.
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.
book writing childhood
A lot of writers that I know have told me that the first book you write, you write about your childhood, whether you want to or not. It calls you back.
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.
writing inspire
What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling.
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.
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?