How Being an Immigrant Influences Storytelling with Téa Obreht, National Book Award Finalist and Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction

+ Why writing in first person feels odd sometimes

Hello, Protagonists!

My guest today on CREATIVE. INSPIRED. HAPPY is Téa Obreht, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, National Book Award Finalist, and international bestseller of The Tiger's Wife and other novels. Her latest book, The Morningside, is out in paperback now.

Today, we talk about:

  • how being an immigrant influences her storytelling,

  • writing in English while sometimes translating in her head from her first language,

  • how she wove a Serbian folktale into a novel about climate disaster

  • why Téa dislikes writing in first person,

  • her advice for writers on spending time on social media,

  • where she discovers her next reads,

  • and so much more.

🎥 Video version: Click on the video above to watch now

  • Transcripts and captions are available for all video episodes. (There’s a button on each video that makes this easy for you).

🎧 Audio version:

» Past podcast episodes live HERE.

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Want more of Téa?

You can find Téa on Instagram and her website, and The Morningside and her other novels are available wherever books are sold!

Téa was born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, and grew up in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States. Her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and an international bestseller. She was the recipient of the Rona Jaffe fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She 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.