Tea Obreht
| Téa Obreht | |
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Obreht at Pen America/Free Expression Literature, May 2014.
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| Born | Tea Bajraktarević 30 September 1985 Belgrade, SR Serbia, SFR Yugoslavia |
| Occupation | Fiction writer |
| Genre | Novels, short stories |
| Notable works | The Tiger's Wife |
| Notable awards | Orange Prize 2011 |
| Website | |
| teaobreht |
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Téa Obreht (born Tea Bajraktarević; 30 September 1985) is a Serbian-American novelist. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2011 for The Tiger's Wife, her debut novel.
Téa Obreht was born as Tea Bajraktarević in the autumn of 1985, in Belgrade, SR Serbia, SFR Yugoslavia as the only child of a single mother, Maja, while her father, a Bosniak, was "never part of the picture."
Because of her lack of a father figure, she was close to her maternal grandparents, especially to her grandfather Štefan, a Slovene of German origin, and to her grandmother, Zahida, a Bosniak. When the Yugoslav Wars started in the early 1990s, there was no fighting in her home town of Belgrade or in Serbia, but there was concern due to her grandparents' religions, as Roman Catholicism and Islam are closely associated with Croatia and Bosnia, respectively, which was a serious distinction at the time of the war. They didn't flee immediately, but decided to move to Cyprus for precautionary reasons when her mother found a job there. Eighteen months later they moved to Cairo, Egypt, guided by her grandfather's job as an aviation engineer.
Her grandparents permanently returned to Belgrade in 1997, while she and her mother settled in the United States, first in Atlanta, where they joined extended family, and later in Palo Alto, California, where her mother was remarried to a Serbian Orthodox man.
Obreht's grandfather died in 2006, and on his deathbed asked her to write under his surname, Obreht. She later decided to change her last name legally as well. After graduating from the University of Southern California, Obreht received a MFA in fiction from the creative writing program at Cornell University in 2009. She currently lives in Ithaca, New York.
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