Manuel Mujica Láinez (1910-1984) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina-a city that one of his ancestors had helped to found. It was also the city where he was raised, though with long periods away in Paris and London, where he studied French and English. Not long after returning to Argentina, he dropped out of law school to pursue a career as a writer. Several of his novels revolve around the history of Buenos Aires, though he is perhaps best remembered for a fantasy novel, The Wandering Unicorn (1965), and Bomarzo (1962), which was awarded the John F. Kennedy Prize.

Gregory Rabassa (1922-2016) was born in Yonkers, New York. One of the most respected translators of his generation, he brought the work of many writers into English-among them Machado de Assis, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa. He was the recipient of the PEN Translation Prize, the Gregory Kolovakos Award, and the first National Book Award in Translation.

Álvaro Enrigue has been a fellow in the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de México, the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, and the program in Latin American studies at Princeton University. He is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, among them Sudden Death, Now I Surrender, and You Dreamed of Empires. He teaches at Hofstra University.