Ornela studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan, and has been living and working in Paris since 1997.
In 2012 she was named one of the 35 best writers of Europe in Best European Fiction by Aleksander Hemon and Zadie Smith.
The Vorpsi family have been recorded in the villages of Tirana before it was established as a city in 1614 by Ottoman Albanian ruler Sulejman Bargjini.
The family turned Muslim during the late 1500s-early 1600s during the Islamization of Albania in the Ottoman Empire.
In 1912 Ramazan Vorpsi killed 12 Serbian soldiers during the Balkan wars when Albania was being invaded by Serbia.