Reza Ghassemi is an Iranian musician, playwright and novelist. His plays, which won prestigious awards in Iran, were banned after the Islamic Revolution. He has since lived in exile in France, where he has pursued his career as a musician and writer with more freedom. In 2002, he was awarded the Golshiri Literary Award for Best First Novel--Iran's most important literary prize--for Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime . Of his other two novels, The Spell Chanted by Lambs (Candle & Fog, 2015) has also been translated into English. Michelle Quay is a scholar, researcher and translator of Persian literature. She teaches Persian language and literature, in addition to Iranian cinema and culture, at Brown University in Providence, RI. She holds a PhD in medieval Persian literature from the University of Cambridge, where she studied as a Gates Scholar.

She is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (2022), and has collaborated on scholarly translations of medieval Persian rhetoric manuals as a postdoctoral researcher. Meanwhile, her contemporary literary translation work has appeared in Kenyon Review , Words Without Borders , World Literature Today , Asymptote , Two Lines Press and elsewhere. She was the inaugural winner of the Mo Habib Translation Prize for Persian literature in 2023. Porochista Khakpour is the author of the novels Sons & Other Flammable Objects , The Last Illusion , and Tehrangeles ; the memoir Sick ; and the essay collection Brown Album .