María Ospina is a teacher and scholar of contemporary Latin American culture and a fiction writer. Her novel Solo un poco aquí (Literatura Random House), winner of Colombia's 2024 Premio Nacional de Novela and the 2023 Premio de Literatura Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is forthcoming in translation in English (Scribner, 2025), German, Italian and Portuguese. Her collection of stories, Azares del cuerpo, published in Colombia (Laguna, 2017), Chile (Edícola) and Spain (Las afueras), was a finalist for the Premio Hispanoamericano de Cuento Gabriel García Márquez in 2018, and has been translated into English (Variations on the Body, Trans. Heather Cleary, Cofee House Press, 2021), and Italian. Her stories have appeared in anthologies and literary journals in Colombia and the United States. Professor Ospina's critical work has focused on the central role that cultural artifacts have played in the context of public discussions about the legacies of violence in Colombia and Latin America, including the wars deployed around the drug trade and armed conflict. Her book El rompecabezas de la memoria. Literatura, cine y testimonio de comienzos del siglo en Colombia (Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2019), studies how novels, films and testimonial practices rethink the figure of the witness and contribute to public understandings of history and to critical ethical reflections about violence and survival that exceed those emerging from conventional political debate and from judicial discourses. Her critical work has also focused on the role of nature in contemporary Colombian culture including literature, film and contemporary mediascapes, and the ways in which symbolic practices challenge representations of so-called natural frontiers as sites of development projects, military expansion, and extractive capitalism, while tracing diverse forms of resistance. Areas of interest also include Latin American film, political ecology, ecofeminism, animal studies, environmental humanities, and gender and sexuality. 

Professor Ospina is the recipient of the Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2022). 

PUBLICATIONS

Solo un poco aquí, (Bogotá: Literatura Random House, 2023) (novel). Winner of the 2023 Premio de Literatura Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Forthcoming in translation in English (Scribner, 2025), Italian (Edícola), Portuguese (Editora Instante)  and German (Unionsverlag). 

Azares del cuerpo, (Bogotá: Laguna Libros, 2017, 2019, 2020); (Santiago de Chile: Edícola Ediciones, 2019); (Madrid: Las Afueras, 2020)  (Short story collection)

• In English:  Variations on the Body, Translated by Heather Cleary, (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press), 2021 (Short story collection)
• In Italian:  Gli azzardi del corpo, Translated by Amaranta Sbardella, (Italy: Edicola) Spring 2020 (Short story collection)

"Dosis impar," in the anthology of short stories Cuerpos. Veinte formas de habitar el mundo (Bogotá: Seix Barral, 2019) and in Contar la vida como contar los pasos. Antología a cargo de Luz Mary Giraldo. (Medellín: Sílaba Editora, 2023)

• in English:  Odd Dose, Translated by Joel Streicker, 128Lit, Fall 2022 

El rompecabezas de la memoria. Literatura, cine y testimonio de comienzos del siglo en Colombia, (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2019)

Articles and other projects include: 

"Natural Plots: The Rural Turn in Contemporary Colombian Cinema." In Territories of Conflict: Traversing Cultural Studies in Colombia. Eds. Alejandro Herrera-Olaizola, Andrea Fanta and Chloe Rutter-Jensen. Rochester (NY: University of Rochester Press, 2017)

"Los embelecos de la gramática: Lengua, literatura y herejías gramaticales en la obra de Fernando Vallejo." Cuadernos de Literatura 37 (Enero-junio 2015)

"Naturalezas de guerra: Topografías violentas de selva en la narrativa colombiana contemporánea." Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Vol. 40, No. 79, 243-264 (2014)

"Trazados peligrosos: Topografías contemporáneas de selva en relatos colombianos de cautiverio." In Geografías imaginarias: Espacios de resistencia y crisis en América Latina. Ed. Marta Sierra. (Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2013)

Cartas de la persistencia, Colección Libro al Viento, (Bogotá: Secretaría Distrital de Cultura, 2008). (Compilator)