Arnon Grunberg is the author of Blue Mondays, an international bestseller that won the Anton Wachter Prize for a debut novel. He is also the author of Phantom Pain, which won the AKO Prize (the Dutch equivalent of the Booker). He currently lives in New York City.

Sam Garrett has won prizes and appeared on short lists for some of the world's most prestigious literary awards for his translations of some 30 novels and works of non-fiction. Garrett is the only translator to have twice won the British Society of Authors' Vondel Prize for Dutch-English translation (in 2003 and again in 2009). In 2012, his translation of The Dinner by Herman Koch spent two months on the New York Times bestseller list and became the most popular Dutch novel ever translated into English. Garrett's translation of Tim Krabbe's The Rider is considered a cycling cult classic. Other works of his have been short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (2005 and 2013), the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Award (2010), the PEN Translation Prize (2014), and the Best Translated Book Award (2014). He divides his time between Amsterdam and the French Pyrenees.