The Essentials

CNN reports that President Obama and his daughters, visiting a D.C. bookstore Nov. 26 to support Small Business Saturday, purchased an armload of books. Among the First Family’s selections: the novels “The Tiger’s Wife” by Téa Obreht, MFA ’09, and “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Díaz, MFA ’95, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for [...]

The first novels by recent Creative Writing Program alumni – both based on their masters’ theses – have been nominated for prestigious literary honors. “The Tiger’s Wife,” by Téa Obreht, MFA ’09, is nominated for a National Book Award. Published by Random House in March, the novel about a young Serbian doctor uncovering her family’s [...]

Following extraordinary reviews and healthy sales, the debut novel “The Tiger’s Wife” has scored another success for its author, Téa Obreht, MFA’09. At 25, she is youngest winner of Britain’s Orange Prize for Fiction, given for the best novel in English by a woman. The tale of a young doctor’s journey through the war-torn Balkans [...]

Creative writing alumna Téa Obreht (Bajraktarevic), MFA ’09, and Philipp Meyer ’99 are among The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” young fiction writers to watch, in the magazine’s Debut Fiction Issue out next week. At 24, Obreht is the youngest writer on the list, which also includes Jonathan Safran Foer. The New Yorker will publish [...]