Grandfather's stories launch dream career

Reviews of Tea Obreht's first novel have ranged from positives to raves. Photo / Supplied

Someone has been sneaking into Tea Obreht's house and stealing her notes. Actually it's worse than that. Someone has found the door to her private Narnia, and they're selling tickets. "It's very strange. I mean you write alone," she says. "My experience of writing The Tiger's Wife was that I worked from 8 at night til 4 or 6 in the morning, every night. You're in absolute solitude. You've invented this world and you visit it every night and then you go home. And now - people have been extraordinarily generous - when someone says, 'The deathless man was my favourite character, can we talk about that?', my gut reaction is, what? Where have you heard about this? Who gave you my notes?"

Obreht is 25. The Tiger's Wife is her first novel. The novel crept up on her, years before she'd expected to graduate beyond short fiction. It was snapped up for publication. The New Yorker got wind of it, asked to see the manuscript and worked with her to reshape an excerpt for the magazine.

She was subsequently chosen last year as the youngest writer on the New Yorker's much talked about 20 Under 40 list: the magazine's pick of the 20 most promising writers under 40 years old. Reviews of the novel have ranged from positive to raves; sales have been strong; the book recently won Obreht a short-listing for Britain's Orange Prize. And she has had her first taste of book touring. I ask her if it's been at all off-putting.

"It's been a very difficult thing to get used to, this feeling of exposure. That being said, I've met wonderful booksellers and wonderful readers, and in reality, writing is all I've ever wanted to do. Even if my experience had been worse, and thankfully it hasn't been ... I can't imagine being put off this life. Because to me it's the ultimate."

Writing really is the only career Obreht has ever considered; or at least, the only one since she was 8 years old. Her mother had a new laptop: one of the first laptops, very expensive, very much the latest thing. She badly wanted to be allowed to use it.

"My mother said fine, this was permitted, but only if I did something that vaguely resembled productivity." So she wrote a story. "It was about a goat. I wrote it in English, because I liked the English word 'goat'. [Obreht was born in Yugoslavia.] I thought it was very beautiful, the way it looked on paper. So I went to my mother and said I've written a story about a goat, and now I think I'll be a writer. My mother said that's very nice, you go ahead. And from then on that was the plan. It remained the constant thing, right throughout my life."

Obreht was born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia. Her family, which consisted of herself, her mother and her grandparents, moved to Cyprus when she was 7, then to Egypt, and finally to the United States. Serbo-Croatian is her birth language. "I'm fluent in Serbo-Croatian. I think of English as my second language; but it's much easier to communicate in English, I think in English, I've never written in anything else. I guess in some ways it's become my primary language."

The Tiger's Wife is set in a nameless, newly partitioned country which is clearly the former Yugoslavia. Its roots are deep in Obreht's childhood, and also in a more recent loss. "It was a very blissful childhood. I didn't spend time with many other children, but I don't remember ever feeling lonely, I was just alone. There were a lot of stories. My grandmother was a very serious storyteller, she and my mother would make stories up for me, and my grandfather was a storyteller, he told stories mostly about his own life."

The stories a grandfather tells his granddaughter are at the heart of The Tiger's Wife: a grandfather who has very recently died, while on a mysterious journey to meet the man at the heart of many of the stories, the deathless man. A man who can't die, much as he would like to. The stories weave in and out of each other and form unlikely cross-connections; novels built up out of accumulations of short stories are a common form among first-time novelists, and Obreht certainly thought of herself as a short-story writer when she began working on the book. This was a big change from her teen years, which she spent writing novel after novel.

"I was writing these medieval-era fantasy things, I had a background of C.S. Lewis and The Narnia Chronicles, which I was raised with. I wrote very poorly through my teens but very, very prolifically. I would churn out a new novel every six months. They would end up in boxes. My mother recently said she might dig out those boxes and have a look through them, and I'm like, please don't."

She went on to college in California, still focused on the dream of writing. "I was writing throughout college. But I hit a wall in terms of my ability. I was in college, I was spending a lot of time on ballroom dancing at this point, three hours most days. With one thing and another what happened was, I stopped reading. So the writing sort of ebbed."

Then a friend gave her a T.C. Boyle short story collection, and she read it in one sitting, during a plane flight from California to Germany. "And suddenly that threshold of understanding just lifted. I saw things structurally, and understood the devices that are used for plot and character, and how as a writer you were able to manipulate the exchange of information from you to the reader, how a story can unfold, is it linear, does the story come together in a spiral - it became this very visual thing that I could understand. I think it had to do with moving away from the idea of novels, which were way beyond what I was able to do at the time, towards the short story. Stories are manageable, you can see them from beginning to end." Two days later, she got an email from the English department at her college: one spot open in T.C. Boyle's writing workshop, please apply.

"I've never slapped anything together so fast in my life. I wrote two stories that week, applied, and got in. I did the workshop, I sat in on it for no credit the following semester as well, just so I could listen ... it was one of those life-altering things that falls in your lap."

She wrote half a dozen short stories in those two semesters, applied for masters programmes all round the country, and ended up at Cornell. Shortly after she was accepted there, her grandfather died.

"That whole year that I was writing those short stories, my grandfather was dying. There was a great deal of denial, on my part and on his part too. My mother was the only one who saw things as they were. And in May he died, and by the following February I had written a short story called The Tiger's Wife, about a little boy whose village is visited by this escaped tiger. And it was a terrible story, just an outline basically, but I wanted to stay with it, and somehow that little boy became the grandfather of a young female narrator, who appeared on the page from nowhere, and suddenly I was writing a novel."

She would still be writing it, left to her own devices. The book is a rich and complex thing, part realist, part magic realist, bridging broad divides of time, ethnicity, geography and religion, and getting it just right became a process with no obvious end point.

"Eventually we finished the last edit, and my editor wrenched it from my extremely grudging fingers, and said 'that's enough! kiss it goodbye!' I didn't want to leave that universe, to have it be closed, that was tough."

* Tea Obreht is a guest at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre, May 11-15