Jean-Philippe Toussaint is a Belgian novelist, photographer, and filmmaker. He is the author of eighteen books, which have been translated into more than twenty languages and won numerous literary prizes, including the 2005 Prix Médicis for Fuir (Running Away) and the 2009 Prix Décembre for La Vérité sur Marie (The Truth about Marie). In 2012 Toussaint created an exhibition at the Louvre Museum that combines photographs, videos, installation art, and performance pieces to convey books without using writing.

Mark Polizzotti has translated more than fifty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, and Raymond Roussel. His translation of Kibogo by Scholastique Mukasonga was short-listed for the National Book Award in 2022, and his translation of Éric Vuillard's The War of the Poor was short-listed for the International Booker Prize in 2021. A Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the recipient of a 2016 American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature, Polizzotti is the author of eleven books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (1995; rev. ed. 2009), which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction; Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados (2006); Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (2006); and Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (2018).