Téa Obreht (born Tea Bajraktarević; 30 September 1985) is a Serbian-American novelist. Her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist. Obreht 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. Her second novel, Inland, was released in 2019. Biography Téa Obreht was born Tea Bajraktarević in the autumn of 1985, in Belgrade, SR Serbia, SFR Yugoslavia, the only child of a single mother, Maja Obreht, while her father, a Bosniak, was "never part of the picture". She was close to her maternal grandparents, especially to her grandfather Štefan Obreht, a Roman Catholic Slovene of German origin, and to her grandmother, Zahida, a Muslim 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 were closely associated with Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, 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 serves as the Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos. She is married to writer Dan Sheehan. Obreht's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story, Harpers, The New York Times and The Guardian, and in anthologies The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading. Among many influences, Obreht has mentioned in press interviews the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, the Yugoslav Nobel Prize winner Ivo