Téa Obreht

Obreht was born in Belgrade and left the former Yugoslavia at age seven, spending childhood years in Cyprus and Egypt before settling in the United States at twelve; she later earned an MFA from Cornell and has taught at Hunter College.

The Tiger's Wife (2011), her debut novel, interweaves a young doctor's investigation into her grandfather's death with two folktales he told her, of a deathless man and a tiger that bonded with a deaf-mute village woman during wartime bombing; published when she was twenty-five, it won the Orange Prize the same year, making her the award's youngest-ever winner.

The New Yorker named her one of its '20 Under 40' American fiction writers, and the National Book Foundation included her among its '5 Under 35.'