Born near Leningrad in 1961, Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist. He received "hundreds of rejections" and was a pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than 75,000 copies of his books in a single year. His novel Death and the Penguin, his first in English translation, became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. As well as writing fiction for adults and children, he has become known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media. His novel Grey Bees was published in the United States by Deep Vellum in 2022, where it became a sensation for its honest and personal representation of life in Ukraine. He lives in Kyiv with his British wife and their three children. Christopher Miller is the chief Ukraine correspondent for the Financial Times and author of The War Came To Us: Life And Death In Ukraine, winner of the 2024 Witold Pilecki International Book Award. He has lived in and worked in Ukraine since 2010, reporting on Ukraine's Euromaidan revolution, Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and its invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.

He has broken major international news stories, including uncovering Russian war crimes, with his reporting cited as evidence before the International Criminal Court. Miller was previously a world and national security reporter for Politico and a world correspondent for BuzzFeed News. When he's not in Kyiv or on the front lines in eastern Ukraine, he lives with his wife and two Ukrainian cats in Brooklyn, New York.