Born in Beira, Mozambique, Mia Couto directed the Mozambican state news agency during the years following independence from Portugal. Since the late 1980s, he has worked as an environmental biologist and a writer. Couto is the author of more than thirty books, which have been published in thirty-five countries. He has won major literary prizes in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Portugal, Brazil., Italy and the United States, including the 2013 Camoes Prize and the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He was a finalist for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize and the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award. Mia Couto lives with his family in Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as an environmental consultant.

David Brookshaw's many translations include Mia Couto's recent novels Woman of the Ashes and The Sword and the Spear, as well as earlier Couto novels such as The Tuner of Silences, Sleepwalking Land, and Under the Frangipani. He has translated widely from the literatures of Lusophone Asia and the Azores Islands. Brookshaw is Professor Emeritus of Lusophone Studies at the University of Bristol, England.

Eric M. B. Becker is the recipient of a PEN Heim Award, a Fulbright Fellowship and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2019, he earned honorable mention from the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for his translation of Mia Couto's Rain and Other Stories. He has translated works by, among others, the Brazilian writers Lygia Fagundes Telles and Fernanda Torres and the Angolan-Portuguese writer Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida. He lives in New York.