Marija Dejanovic was born in Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1992. She grew up in Croatia, Sisak, and currently lives between Zagreb, Croatia, and Larissa, Greece. She studied Comparative literature and Pedagogy at the University of Zagreb. In 2018, Ethics of Bread and Horses(Etika kruha i konja) won the Goran award and the Kvirin award; in 2019, Heartwood (Sredisnji god) won the Zdravko Pucak. In 2021, her third book, Kindness Separates Night From Day (Dobrota razdvaja dan i noc) was shortlisted for Croatia's biggest poetry award, Tin Ujevic and the regional award Avdina Okarina.

Vesna Maric was born in Mostar Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1976 and left at sixteen as part of a convoy of refugees. She went on to work for the BBC World Service and now writes Lonely Planet travel guides, translates literary fiction and non-fiction from Croatian into English, and writes a variety of journalism for publications including the Guardian. Maric's memoir, Bluebird, was published by Granta in 2009, and was longlisted for The Orwell Prize; her first novel, The President Shop, was published by Sandorf Passage in 2021.