News from the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival

From the latest Festival newsletter:

Meet Téa Obreht

Over the next few weeks leading up to the festival we will be introducing you to a few of the authors who will be featuring this year, this week we meet the very gifted Téa Obreht. ( Photograph: Alexi Zentner)


At just 26 years old Obreht is already a well-achieved writer, her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times and The Guardian.

The Serbian-born author was well travelled in her younger years, having been forced to leave Yugoslavia after war broke out, spending periods in Cyprus and Egypt before finally settling in the US in 1997. Obreht achieved a Masters degree in Creative Writing in Southern California before eventually settling in Ithaca, New York, where she now resides.

She has been deemed a writer talented far beyond her years, and she has been including the New Yorker's recent top 20 authors under 40 list.

Obreht's first novel, The Tigers Wife, was published in 2010 and instantly gathered great critical acclaim:

"A brilliant debut…Obreht is an expert at depicting history through aftermath, people through the love they inspire, and place through the stories that endure; the reflected world she creates is both immediately recognizable and a legend in its own right." Publishers Weekly

You can read an excerpt of The Tiger's Wife as featured on The New York Times website. You can also read her short story The Laugh, courtesy of The Atlantic.

And a review of The Tiger's Wife in The Guardian.