Téa Obreht

Tea Obreht is a Serbian-American novelist, born in Belgrade in 1985 and raised largely in the United States after her family left the former Yugoslavia during the wars of the 1990s. She earned an MFA in fiction from Cornell University and rose to international acclaim with her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, a multigenerational story set in a fictionalized Balkan country, which won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction (now the Women's Prize for Fiction) and was a National Book Award finalist. Her second novel, Inland, reimagines the drought-stricken American West of the 1890s through interwoven frontier stories, and her third, The Morningside, is a coming-of-age novel set in a flooded near-future city. Obreht's fiction blends historical research, myth, and lyrical prose across shifting times and places.