About Tea Obreht: Téa Obreht is an American novelist. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2011 for The Tiger's Wife, her debut novel.
When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.
I've always written about animals. I'm still trying to process why that is.
I grew up in Cyprus and Egypt, these fantastic places I remember fondly.
Grandfather recently died. He died alone on a trip away from home in a town where no one expected him to be
Knowing, above all, that I would come looking, and find what he had left for me, all that remained of The Jungle Book in the pocket of his doctor’s coat, that folder-up, yellowed page torn from the back of the book, with a bristle of thick, coarse ...
A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.
My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996.
For me it was a lot harder to come to terms with the death of my grandfather than it was to come to terms with what's happened to the former Yugoslavia.
I think the mythology of death really ran away with me when I was very young.
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.
You never know what's going to happen in your life, and you never know what's going to happen in someone else's life either.
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 d...