Téa Obreht

Téa Obreht's new novel is The Tiger's Wife.

From her 2009 Q & A  with Cotton Codinha in the Atlantic:

Who are your biggest personal influences?

In terms of writers, I definitely have to say I am greatly influenced by writing that I love. Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita), Gabriel García Márquez, and Hemingway. 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.

What do you want to explore with your writing? What themes do you find yourself coming back to?

I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters. What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling. I like to explore the idea of common conflict in perhaps a more amplified environment in my writing. Human conflict is human conflict I guess anywhere, but I like to explore the interactions of people with place and how place influences characters’ decisions, and their conflicts with one another, and also with the place itself—that’s something that...[read on]

Visit Téa Obreht's website.

--Marshal Zeringue