Joan Sales (1912 - 1983) was born in Barcelona to a Catalan family. In 1932, he earned a law degree from the University of Barcelona and in 1933 married Maria Núria Folch. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Sales was working for the Catalan government as an advocate for the expanded use of the Catalan language. A former member of the Communist party, he fought in defence of the Republic on the Madrid and Aragonese fronts. In January 1939, as the Fascist forces advanced, he crossed the French border and was interned in a transit camp, before continuing an exile that took him from Paris to Santo Domingo in 1940 and Mexico City in 1942, where he trained as a typesetter and founded a magazine devoted to writings by the exile community. He returned to Catalonia in 1948 and he cofounded the Club Editor publishing house, where he would edit and publish some of the most important authors of twentieth-century Catalan literature, among them Màrius Torres and Mercè Rodoreda, as well as his own work, including a book of poems, Viatge d'un moribund (1952); a collection of letters from his wartime and exile experiences, Cartes a Màrius Torres (1976); and a Catalan translation of The Brothers Karamazov. He died in Barcelona. Peter Bush has translated, among other books, Josep Pla's The Gray Notebook, which was awarded the 2014 Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation; Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Tyrant Banderas ; Luis Martín-Santos's Time of Silence ; and Joan Sales's Uncertain Glory , of which Winds of the Night is a continuation (all available as NYRB Classics).

He lives in Bristol, England. Paul Preston is the Príncipe de Asturias Professor of Contemporary Spanish Studies and the director of the Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies at the London School of Economics. His many books on the Spanish Civil War include The Spanish Holocaust , short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2012, and, most recently, The Last Days of the Spanish Republic.