He won the Romulo Gallegos Prize[1] for his novel El país de la canela, part of a trilogy about the invasion and conquest of South America.

He has written essays about Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, One Thousand and One Nights, Alfonso Reyes, Estanislao Zuleta, and William Shakespeare.

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

[10][11] 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 to these characters.

This book differs from his previous works, focused on Latin American history, to the description of global historical events with an emphasis on European romanticism and its influence in the present day.

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 transfer to a mythical past.

[16] 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.