Yan Lianke is the author of works including Dream of Ding Village, The Day the Sun Died, The Four Books, Three Brothers, and Hard Like Water. He has been awarded the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Royal Society of Literature International Writer Lifetime Award, and was twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. He has received two of China's most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award. He was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China.

Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright and International Booker Prize-longlisted literary translator who has translated over thirty books from across the Chinese-speaking world, including Yan Lianke's memoir The Women. Originally from Singapore, Tiang now lives in Flushing, Queens.