Tea Obreht Books in Order

Tea Obreht was born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, in 1985. She spent parts of her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before immigrating to the United States in 1997, when she was twelve.

That early life involved a lot of movement. Questions of home, memory, borders, and the stories families carry with them later became central to her fiction, whether she is writing about the Balkans, the American West, or an imagined future.

Obreht studied at the University of Southern California and earned an MFA in fiction from Cornell University in 2009. Her short fiction appeared in magazines and anthologies before her first novel arrived, and she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree in 2010.

Her grandfather was a key figure in her upbringing and in her path as a writer. Before he died, he asked her to publish under Obreht, her mother's maiden name, and she took that name as her own.

That family tie stayed with her.

Her debut, The Tiger's Wife, came out in 2011. Set in a Balkan country healing after war, it follows a young doctor trying to understand her grandfather's death through stories of an immortal man and a tiger that escaped a zoo. The novel brought together grief, medicine, folklore, and family history, and it won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction while also becoming a National Book Award finalist.

With Inland, Obreht moved to the drought-stricken Arizona Territory of 1893. The novel follows Nora, holding her household together while waiting for her missing family, and Lurie, an immigrant wanderer who is haunted by the dead. It draws on the history of the U.S. Camel Corps, but stays close to people trying to survive a hard landscape, make a home, and live with what they have lost.

Her later novels keep changing the map. The Morningside takes place in a partially flooded future city, where a young woman searches for the truth behind her family's displacement and a mysterious neighbor's life. Sunrise returns to Wyoming through three connected timelines, linking a plane crash, a historical reenactment, and a missing boy in an Old West town.

The landscape is never just scenery.

Across her work, Obreht returns to animals, ghosts, folklore, migration, and the uncertain line between history and the version of history people choose to tell. From 2020 to 2022, she held the Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Texas State University. She now lives in Wyoming with her family, close to the wide Western country that has found its way into more than one of her books.