Ola Hansson was born in the Swedish province of Scania in 1860. His literary debut came with two lyrical works: Poemas (1884) and Nocturno (1885), while beginning his career as a journalist and literary critic. In 1887 his best-known work, Sensitive Love, was published, a novel that caused a huge scandal in puritanical Sweden at the time given its marked decadent tone and its open treatment of relationships between the sexes.
Not a prophet on his land, Hansson left Sweden to settle in Germany, where he achieved recognition thanks to his wife, critic Laura Marholm, and where he helped reintroduce Nietzsche and disseminate Strindberg's work. Impoverished and devastated by alcoholism and paranoid tendencies, his exile continued through several places in Europe until he reached Turkey, where he died in 1925. In his later years his work began to be valued also in his native country.
Author so far unpublished in Spanish, the introduction of decadentism in Scandinavia is considered a pioneer within modern Swedish literature, and one of its most bold and original authors.