Téa Obreht’s success has her worried, said Rebecca Thurlow in The Wall Street Journal. The 25-year-old writer, who was born in the former Yugoslavia, last week became the youngest-ever winner of Britain’s Orange Prize for fiction, thanks to her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife. The story of a young doctor investigating her grandfather’s death in the aftermath of a Balkan war, the book traffics heavily in the region’s folklore, the same kind that seems to be affecting Obreht’s outlook these days. “I now get to do what I love, and that is insane to me,” she says. “There’s this superstition in the Balkans that if you are happy, something is going to get you.” She based her novel on the life and tales of her own grandfather, who passed away several years ago. “We were very close,” she says.
Obreht’s dark superstitions are offset in part by her sense that her grandfather would have been proud of her, said Carolyn Kellogg in the Los Angeles Times. A big believer in the American dream, he insisted that his granddaughter move to the U.S., and it was his death that got Obreht writing. “I started writing this relationship about a girl and her grandfather,” she says. “It all happened naturally.” What she says she values most about her success is the fact that her book will now be translated into several languages, including Serbo-Croatian. “My grandma is going to get to read it. She has never read any of my work, and that will be nice.”
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