Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own nonfiction genre, which gathers a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time." Anna Gunin's recent translations include Oleg Pavlov's award-winning Requiem for a Soldier (2015) and MikailEldin's war memoirs The Sky Wept Fire (2013). Her translations of Pavel Bazhov's folk tales appear in Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (2012), shortlisted for the 2014 Rossica Prize. Arch Tait has translated thirty books, short stories, and essays by most of today's leading Russian writers. His translation of Anna Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia (2004) was awarded the inaugural PEN Literature in Translation prize in 2010.

Most recently, he has translated Mikhail Gorbachev's The New Russia (2016).