United States<\/a>. She had already, in 2010, become the youngest person on The New Yorker magazine\u2019s list of the 20 best writers under 40.<\/p>\nIt was a lot. Arguably too much.<\/p>\n
Obreht retreated, faced down doubt, worked through (and threw out) drafts of new novels, and learned how to write with the glare of success\u2019s torchlight shining in her face. \u201cThat was a vulnerable time because The Tiger\u2019s Wife had been a very personal book and the material for it was childhood,\u201d she says. \u201cThe well was empty by the time the next book was on the docket. It took me eight years to get there, but a transformative learning experience happened in that time. I learned how to write again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fast-forward to 2026. Obreht\u2019s new novel, Sunrise, her fourth after the acclaimed The Morningside (2024) and Inland (2019), sits between us on the table. It\u2019s a book that ambitiously intertwines three dizzyingly different stories. Obreht threads together the narrative of Nina, a young woman who survives a plane crash in Wyoming in 2024 and needs to make her way back out of the wilderness; Anton Vargas, a gunslinger in 1902 searching for an old friend, Preacher; and Colin Yard, an amateur historian and theatre-maker with secrets, in 2003.<\/p>\n
Myth, hidden truths and the quest for survival are all explored in the novel, which coalesces to some degree in the rousing, heart-quickening conclusion.<\/p>\n
Lit up with expressive, delicate prose, Sunrise is the work of a confident writer, one Obreht now recognises she is. She wrote the book without having detailed plotting in place at every juncture.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the first time I had gone that far into a book without knowing what the ending would be,\u201d she says. She trusted that instinct would guide her. \u201cI have a good sense now of when something is working,\u201d she says. How does she know? \u201cIt joins you in your every day,\u201d she says. \u201cYou\u2019re thinking about it all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Téa](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/N6N3LOKYEFBVRBWZZWFHKFJYWM.jpg\")
T\u00e9a Obreht: ‘I\u2019m excited. My relationship with Ireland is built on holidays, especially Christmastime.’ Photograph: Bryan Meade <\/p>\n
The \u201cevery day\u201d looks different now than it once did. Last month, she and her husband, the Irish writer Dan Sheehan, packed up their belongings, left their condo in Wyoming, where they\u2019d lived since 2018, and moved to D\u00fan Laoghaire, to a rental house that is a mile and a half from Sheehan\u2019s parents.<\/p>\n
Relocating isn\u2019t new to Obreht. Born in Belgrade in 1985, she moved to Cyprus and Cairo as a child before settling with her mother in the US at the age of 12. A graduate of the MFA programme at Cornell University, she has lived in New York, teaching at Hunter College, then at the University of Texas. But this latest switch is still a jolt. She has a new home, a new baby \u2013 five-month-old Maeve (\u201cShe\u2019s at home; this is the first time I\u2019ve left her.\u201d) \u2013 and a new job. <\/p>\n
Obreht will start at Maynooth University as a part-time lecturer in creative writing next month. She looks calm and happy \u2013 elegant in black, chatty and bearing no trace of new-mom exhaustion \u2013 but how is she feeling about all the changes in her life and her move to Ireland?<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m excited,\u201d she says. \u201cMy relationship with the country is built on holidays, especially Christmastime. I\u2019m looking forward to finding out what the literary community is like, what it\u2019s like to parent young people in Ireland. There\u2019s so much of the country that I haven\u2019t seen. I want to explore as much as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Obreht met her husband, who works remotely for the website Literary Hub, when they were both living in New York, after the publication of The Tiger\u2019s Wife. They got married after just eight months together, when she was 28 and he was 26, at the Unitarian Church in Dublin.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe met at a literary party,\u201d she recalls. \u201cWe got chatting and we closed down the bar, then shared a taxi to the same neighbourhood. We both lived in Harlem, two blocks away from each other. We ended up sitting on the street until morning. I was charmed by his accent. He was very chatty and transparent and I liked that a lot.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u2018I like to make the reader uncomfortable and I like to make myself uncomfortable as wel\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2014 \u00a0T\u00e9a Obreht<\/p>\n
Is it difficult navigating a relationship with another writer? One imagines it might be. \u201cI\u2019d been in relationships with other writers before in which the delicacy of that balance didn\u2019t work out. But with Dan, he\u2019s very self-assured. Because we both work from home, we end up sharing our work with each other: early drafts and later drafts. There\u2019s a wonderful camaraderie.\u201d<\/p>\n
The couple have moved to Dublin partly to see more of Dan\u2019s parents, but also as a respite from the US; specifically its gun control laws. Their first-born daughter, four-year-old Nella, is starting school next month and it felt urgent to leave the US before that happened. \u201cAs soon as we had her, the looming spectre of gun violence in American schools became something we talked and thought about a lot,\u201d Obreht says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWyoming is a deep red state. Our town, Jackson, is a more progressive pocket, but the state \u2013 it\u2019s the least populous state, there\u2019s 500,000 people \u2013 is deeply conservative. It\u2019s a place in which gun culture is very prominent, but that\u2019s the case all over the States. The way we felt was, if you can manage to offer your child a childhood in which they don\u2019t have to learn nursery rhymes about what to do in case of an active shooter in the school, you should probably do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
If we were in a coffee shop in her old town instead of a Dublin hotel, would customers likely be armed? \u201cThey would be allowed to, but culturally probably not. But in most of the other towns in Wyoming it\u2019s common enough. I always found it jarring. I never got used to it. It should be jarring to see a deadly weapon on someone\u2019s hip, at the grocery store.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perhaps appropriately given these concerns, a barbaric quality runs through Sunrise. In the 2003 part of the tale, a man strides into a bar on a Thursday night with a dismembered wolf, which he proceeds to seat at his table and then dance with. It\u2019s discomfiting and eerie, and that\u2019s the intention. <\/p>\n
\u201cI like to make the reader uncomfortable and I like to make myself uncomfortable as well,\u201d Obreht says. \u201cComplicity is a huge theme for me. There\u2019s often a character who has done something they\u2019re not necessarily proud of, something they\u2019re trying to excuse. That\u2019s always present in my work, along with,\u201d she says with a laugh, \u201cthe obligatory corpse.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Téa](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/4JN57Z5BEZCFBIXI2KZLRTFYQM.jpg\")
T\u00e9a Obreht recently moved with her Irish husband and their children to D\u00fan Laoghaire, Co Dublin. Photograph: Bryan Meade <\/p>\n
We\u2019re also introduced to Vargas, a fabled gunslinger who plays the hero in a manuscript discovered by Nina, the young woman who survives a plane crash in the Wyoming mountains. Nina discovers the unpublished book when she wanders into Sunrise, an abandoned frontier town, frozen in time. Vargas was a founding father of Sunrise but Nina discovers in her reading that he was alsocomplex and ambiguous. <\/p>\n
Obreht was keen to explore the tension between mythmaking and reality. \u201cWith these folkloric heroes, there\u2019s so much of their personalities that gets ironed out,\u201d she says. \u201cPeople like Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok and Jesse James. These legends who were so exalted in the States that they actually became global in their reach. Buffalo Bill Cody toured with his Wild West show for many years, all over the world. Made it to the Balkans.\u201d<\/p>\n
Obreht was eight years old when she started writing stories. She loved magic realism \u2013 inspired by writers including Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez \u2013 and the sense of an anchor fiction offered her. \u201cWhat was appealing was the ability to disappear inside a world of my own,\u201d she says. \u201cThat remains appealing to me to this day. There\u2019s something about it when it\u2019s going well. It gives me an elation I don\u2019t feel in other spaces. There\u2019s an element of escape and control, a curated isolation.\u201d <\/p>\n
She began her research for Sunrise more than a decade ago, inspired by old Hollywood Westerns, which she first came to because of grandparents\u2019 interest in them. \u201cI did a tour of Wyoming, Utah and Montana in 2015, doing research and stopped in a lot of places. Really small regional museums and bigger museums including the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in a town called Cody, Wyoming, which he founded. To this day there are statues of him everywhere and a well-run museum.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was where the fascination took hold. With Buffalo Bill Cody, he\u2019s allegedly buried in a place called Golden, Colorado. There\u2019s a great point of debate about why he\u2019s buried there when he had the hometown of Cody, Wyoming to go back to. There\u2019s this almost rivalry between the towns, and rumours of his body being snatched. I was fascinated by how deeply people feel a history like that belongs to them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Talking of belonging, national self-definition is something Obreht seems comfortable keeping fairly loose. \u201cI think of myself as a pretty international author. I think of myself as Yugoslav-American, but my writing, I\u2019ve always felt, is more global than that. Because I\u2019ve lived in so many places.\u201d<\/p>\n
Obreht doesn\u2019t have an Irish passport yet \u2013 \u201cmy children do\u201d \u2013 but she may in the future, if Ireland proves to be the right home for their family. \u201cA huge part of my childhood was moving around. I always expect that everything in my life is sort of temporary. For many years, it was like, \u2018Well, you\u2019ve been here four years, so it\u2019s time to go.\u2019 As I\u2019ve gotten older, those stretches have gotten longer and longer. Perhaps here will be the longest of all. That\u2019s certainly my hope.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sunrise by T\u00e9a Obreht is published by W&N<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI was a shy person. I\u2019m still not someone who likes a lot of attention. Emotionally, on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":588177,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[615,16089,93,61,60,115,90,174027,125724],"class_list":["post-588176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-dublin","tag-dun-laoghaire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-united-states","tag-us","tag-women-s-writing","tag-women-writers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=588176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/588177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=588176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=588176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=588176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}