William Ospina

Ospina has written several essays and articles regarding this period, establishing how valuable the understanding of these events is for the comprehension of Latin-Americans’ identity, as well as its social, cultural, and political challenges.

The third book, La serpiente sin ojos, narrates the attempt of Ursúa to repeat Orellana’s trip to discover the country of the Amazons. The book also recounts the crimes of Lope de Aguirre.

Ospina has represented Colombia in literary international evets, including Panama’s book fair in 2017 and Dominican Republic’s book fair in 2019. The magazine Arcadia included his novel, El año del verano que nunca llegó, in the recommended books to read in the  Bogota’s Book Fair of 2015.

His work has been used by universities and academic groups to analyze political history of Colombia and other countries. In 2018, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo posted an article about the divisions within the country because of Catalonia, the article proposes Ospina’s idea of a united nation in which all differences are accepted, as a solution to the Spanish conflict.

In 2015, Ospina publishes his novel El Verano que nunca llegó, where he depicts his literary investigation about the story of Villa Doidati and the events that in 1816 gave birth to the two famous literary works of Frankenstein and The Vampyre. The story travels back and forth in time, describing Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and Mary Shelly´s life events and Ospina´s visit to sites connected these characters.

He has openly criticized the ineffectiveness of the Colombian government to protect its people and care for its necessities. He also recriminates the Colombian population for its apathy and lack of strong demands to its government. He has supported the Colombian peace process and on April 9, 2013, during a national march of over a million people, the Colombian congresswoman Piedad Córdoba read a prayer named Oración por la paz written by Ospina.

The second book, El país de la canela, tells the first trip of Francisco de Orellana through the Amazon River and the conquests of Francisco Pizarro. This novel was awarded the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 2009.

In 2005, Ospina starts a trilogy of semi-historical novels about this time period:

He has been praised by icons of Latin American literature. In 1996, Mario Vargas Llosa wrote a 2-page article in the newspaper El Pais where he analyzes the collection of essays Es tarde para el hombre, he judges Ospina's work as bewitching and of high quality, although Vargas Llosa does not agree with his ideas, he describes the author as a skilled manufacturer of sociological fictions that transfers to a mythical past. In 2005, Gabriel García Márquez defined Ospina’s first novel as "the best book of the year", and Fernando Vallejo stated that the prose used in Ursúa has no competitor in the Spanish language.

He grew up in Cali where he studied law and political sciences at Santiago de Cali University. He quit his job and decided to devote to literature. He lived in Paris from 1979 to 1981. When he returned to Colombia, he became editor for the Sunday news of La Prensa Newspaper in Bogotá (1988-1989). He has written essays about Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, León Tolstói, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, One Thousand and One Nights, Alfonso Reyes, Estanislao Zuleta, and William Shakespeare.

William Ospina (2 March 1954) is a Colombian poet, essayist and novelist. He was born in Herveo, Tolima. He won the Romulo Gallegos Prize for his novel El país de la canela, part of a trilogy about the invasion and conquest of South America.

William Ospina was born in Herveo, Tolima on 2 March 1954, but his family had to move around the south of the Colombia quite often due to the violence of the time. His father, Luis Ospina, a nurse and musician nurtured in his son a strong passion for Colombian culture "We had no books and home, but we had all the songs".