People like Téa Obreht

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.

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.