“I’ve come to realize how much specific places have an effect on your mind, your imagination, your relationship to self, the person that you feel you are. You feel these seismic changes in your own psychology.”

—Téa Obreht

Since 2011, when Téa Obreht became the youngest-ever recipient of the Orange Prize for Fiction for her debut novel The Tiger’s Wife, the Belgrade-born novelist has been a writer to watch. Named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty, Obreht has wowed critics and readers with richly developed characters, subtle plot, and evocative sense of place. With her second novel, the New York Times bestseller Inland, which President Barack Obama called “terrific,” Obreht graduated from wildly talented newcomer to one of the finest fiction writers of her generation.

Delightfully mashing up several genres, including Western gothic, murder mystery and survival saga, her newest novel Sunrise has been hailed as “masterful” (The New York Times) and “thrilling and ingenious” (Laila Lalami, author of The Dream Hotel). “Readers will have a blast,” raves Publishers Weekly (starred review). 

Sunrise starts with a plane crash in the Wyoming mountains. Nina, an art history graduate student with death anxiety, is the only survivor and the least likely candidate to endure the predicament she now faces. As she navigates the wilderness alone, armed with nothing but a dying cellphone and a few protein bars, she stumbles onto the isolated ghost town of Sunrise. Weaving together three narrative threads across 100 years of history, Obreht’s novel challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the people and places to which we lay claim, and, most of all, of our own lives.

“[Obreht] delivers a virtuoso performance. In her hands, these three narratives aren’t just satisfying on their own. They illuminate each other in ways that are both elegant and emotionally deep . . . An adventurous, rewarding novel from a writer who just gets better and better.”

—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Obreht’s penchant for building surreal and folkloric worlds is skillfully woven into The Morningside, praised as “an ideal novel in which all is invented and everything is true” (Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams). Shortlisted for the first-ever Climate Fiction Prize, The Morningside was adapted from the short story of the same name that was part of The New York Times Magazine‘s pandemic-era Decameron Project.

Her debut, The Tiger’s Wife, was an international bestseller and National Book Award finalist. The novel is a brilliant latticework of loss, love, and family legend. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called the debut “stunning… a richly textured and searing novel.” Set in an unnamed Balkan nation still reeling from war, The Tiger’s Wife follows a young doctor, Natalia, as she pieces together the mysterious circumstances of her beloved grandfather’s death. The Tiger’s Wife was named among the best books of the year by The New York Time Book Review, Publisher’s Weekly, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, O: The Oprah Magazine, and many others.

“Obreht is the kind of writer who can forever change the way you think about a thing, just through her powers of description.”

—O: The Oprah Magazine

In her “beautifully wrought” (Vanity Fair) second novel, Inland, Obreht plunges her readers into an epic landscape both foreign and familiar: that of the American West. Writing in The Washington Post, Ron Charles calls Inland “a voyage of hilarious and harrowing adventures, told in the irresistible voice of a restless, superstitious man determined to live right but tormented by his past. At times, it feels as though Obreht has managed to track down Huck Finn years after he lit out for the Territory.”

The novel was listed among the 100 Must-Read Books of 2019 by TIME, The Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2019, the Best Literary Fiction of 2019 by Library Journal, and the 100 Best Books for Adults of 2019 by the New York Public Library. It was longlisted for both the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction and Dublin Literary Award, and was named a finalist for the 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize among other honors.

In addition to a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, Obreht received the Rona Jaffe fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She splits her time between Wyoming and Ireland, and recently joined the Fiction Faculty at the Creative Writing program at Maynooth University in County Kildare.

For more information on Téa Obreht, please visit her on Instagram and at teaobreht.com.