Ognjen Spahić was born on March 14, 1977 in Podgorica.

He published the books of stories Sve to (2001), Zimska potraga (2007) and Puna glava radosti (2014), and the novels Hansenova djeca (2004) and Masalai (2015). His works have been translated into English, French, Czech, Greek, Turkish, Romanian, Italian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Hungarian, Macedonian, Albanian and German.

For the novel Hansenova djeca, he won the “Meša Selimović” Award for the best novel published in Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2005. For the same novel he won an international literary award Ovid Festival Prize for the year 2011. For the book of stories Puna glava radosti, he was awarded the European Union Award for Literature. A short story Rejmond je mrtav. Karver je umro, rekoh was included in the annual anthology Best European Fiction 2011 published by Dalkey Archive Press from Chicago.

With the novel Hansenova djeca – Hansen’s Children, Ognjen Spahić positioned himself, in the context of the new Montenegrin literature, as a distinctive author, quickly gaining popularity outside of Montenegro and winning some valuable literary awards.

On the thematic level, Hansenova djeca represents a novel of the last European leprosarium, but placing the action in the southeastern Romania in the time immediately before and after the fall of Ceausescu, Spahić has clearly indicated the allegorical potential of his novelistic debut. Narrated in the first person, the novel takes the form of an intimate confession of an unnamed narrator who is also one of the inhabitants of the leprosarium. Far from being only a dull confession, the novel represents a complex, rich in style, convincing genre fiction and narratively powerful composition comprised of a series of reminiscences and stories about the disease and the patients, cut off from the world and situated inside a fenced area ruled by suffering, pain and the struggle for survival, of the plans to escape from the place of dehumanizing isolation and inevitable solitude.