Téa Obreht and Emily O'Grady on Balkan fairytales, nepo babies and wild creatures

Author of The Tiger's Wife Téa Obreht reterns with Morningside, a dystopian fairy tale, and Stella Prize-shortlisted author Emily O'Grady on the rotten characters in her novel Feast.

Téa Obreht won The Women's Prize for Fiction — then called the Orange Prize — for her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife and at the time she was the youngest ever winner of the award. It was a family saga, about doctors, death and the Balkan wars. She followed it up with a Western called Inland. With her new novel, Morningside, Obreht has shifted gears again with a dystopian fairy tale set in a flooded future version of what feels a lot like Manhattan.

The Stella Prize will be announced this week; it's an annual prize for Australian women and non-binary writers. One of this year's shortlisted authors is Emily O'Grady for her novel, Feast. The book is about an unconventional family meeting in a run-down Scottish castle and was described by the Stella Prize judges as a 'perfect jewel of a novel'.