Only a Little While Here A Novel

This prizewinning novel interweaves four animal odysseys in a gripping, adventurous meditation on migration and displacement in the inextricable human and natural worlds.

In Only a Little While Here, award-winning author María Ospina evokes the gratification to be found through close, humble observation of nature. With characteristic precision and intensity, Ospina trains our attention on the lives of five creatures: a migratory songbird dazzled by city lights, an orphaned porcupine saved by kindness, two dogs grieving the loss of their human companions, and a determined beetle transported to a vast, unimaginable world. The surprising drama of their lives reveals the fragility and power of belonging, and what it means to create—or lose—a home. Along the way, our narrator models the attentiveness needed to mend the rift between humans and non-human creatures and celebrates animals’ often-overlooked status as witnesses of our shared world.

Alive with eagle-eyed curiosity, Only a Little While Here is ecological fiction at its most soul stirring.

María Ospina was born in Bogotá, Colombia. She’s a professor of Latin American culture at Wesleyan University. Her first book of fiction, the short story collection Azares del cuerpo, was published in Colombia, Chile, and Spain, and was translated into Italian and English (Variations on the Body). Her stories have appeared in Colombian anthologies and in literary magazines in the United States. She has also written extensively about contemporary Colombian culture in light of legacies of extractivism, violence, and war, including the book Memory’s Conundrum: Literature, Film, and Testimony at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Only a Little While Here, winner of the Colombian National Novel Award (2024) and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Literature (2023) is her first novel.

Heather Cleary is based in New York and Mexico City. She is the author of The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction and has written about translation for publications such as LitHub, Two Lines, and Poets & Writers. Her other translations include María Ospina’s short story collection Variations on the Body, Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda (nominee, International Booker Prize), Recital of the Dark Verses by Luis Felipe Fabre (winner, Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize), Pink Slime by Fernanda Trias, and Comemadre by Roque Larraquy (both nominated for the National Book Award in Translation), as well as a selected works of Oliverio Girondo titled Poems to Read on a Streetcar. Cleary holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian cultures from Columbia University and previously taught at Sarah Lawrence College.