This is only the continuation of a staggering success this young writer has had in America in only a few months. A critic for the Washington Post called this new literary star the Balkan Singer, and her book is on all the bestsellers lists. Tea Obreht speaks to the London Guardian about herself and her Belgrade upbringing, superstition, fears and Balkan memories, and her novel which will soon be available through “Laguna” publishing on the Serbian market.
For the first seven years of her life, growing up in Belgrade, Téa Obreht was steeped in superstition and storytelling. She lived with her mother and maternal grandparents, and she gradually learned the basics: that you should never make a gift of an empty wallet, you should always give money to a homeless person before heading off on a journey, that the scissors her grandmother placed beneath the bed were intended to ward off evil.
“I learned that if you cross a threshold to go on a journey,” she says, “even just to buy flowers down the street, you are not allowed to turn around and cross again until the journey’s done – so if you forget your money, you’re crap out of luck!”
As civil war swept the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Obreht and her family moved to Cyprus, then Egypt, before she and her mother settled in the US. She was 12. But she retains some of the superstitions. She still knocks on wood. She still makes a spitting gesture at a baby.
And she still worries that if something wonderful happens, something awful is lurking around the corner. This explains her slight ambivalence at winning the Orange prize for her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife.
At 25, she is the youngest woman ever to win, and she has done so in a year with a supremely strong shortlist, making the achievement all the sweeter.