Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. After graduating from the University of Southern California, Téa received her M.F.A. in Fiction from the Creative Writing Program at Cornell University in 2009. Her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, will be published by Random House in 2011. Her fiction debut—-an excerpt of The Tiger’s Wife in The New Yorker-—was selected for the 2010 Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her second publication, the short story “The Laugh,” was published in the summer 2009 fiction issue of The Atlantic, and will be anthologized in the 2010 Best American Short Stories. She currently lives in Ithaca, New York.
Obreht read from her work on April 22, 2010, in Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall. This interview took place two months later.