Olga Merino was born in Barcelona in 1965. She studied information sciences and specialised in her master's in Latin American history and literature in the UK. She has lived in London and in Moscow, where she was a correspondent for El Periódico de Catalunya for five years, and lived through the transition of the Soviet Union to a market economy. In 1999 she published her first novel. Red Ashes, to great acclaim, and in 2004 Paper Spurs was published. In 2006 she won the Vargas Llosa NH Award for her story Rules are Rules. Her novels have been translated into Italian, Dutch and English.