Ornela Vorpsi was born in Tirana, Albania in 1968 and currently lives and works in Paris. She has written and painted since early childhood and is a graduate in painting from the Akademia e arteve të bukura in Tirana and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milano. She then continued her studies at the Université Paris VIII, in philosophy.
For decades she found refuge in writing. Although her native language is Albanian, she turned to Italian and French, always on the hunt for a language stripped of the hazards and traumas of childhood. Her books have been published in nineteen languages.