Inès Cagnati (1937-2007) was born in Monclar, France, in the Aquitaine region of Lot-et-Garonne, and died in Orsay. The child of Italian immigrants, she became a French citizen but never considered herself French. With a bachelor's degree in modern literature and a certificate for secondary-school instruction, she worked as a professor of literature at the Lycée Carnot in Paris. Cagnati was the author of four prize-winning books: Le Jour de congé (Free Day, 1973); Génie la folle (1976); Mosé, ou Le Lézard qui pleurait (1979); and Les Pipistrelles (1989).

Liesl Schillinger is a literary critic, writer, and translator, and teaches journalism and criticism at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts of the New School for Social Research in New York City. Her articles, reviews, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New Atlantic, The Washington Post, and other publications. She has translated works by Alexandre Dumas fils, Nataša Dragnić, Jean Echenoz, and others, and is the author of Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century. In 2017 she was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of France.