Téa Obreht

Téa Obreht was born on September 30, 1985, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), and moved to the United States in 1997. She studied at the University of Southern California and earned an MFA from Cornell University. Her debut novel was published when she was just twenty-five, making her one of the youngest winners of major international literary prizes. Obreht's debut novel The Tiger's Wife (2011), set in the Balkans and blending magical realism with the legacy of war, won the Orange Prize for Fiction—making her the youngest winner of that prize—and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. Her second novel Inland (2019), a Western set in the nineteenth-century American frontier, was also widely praised. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Cornell University.