Masatsugu Ono is one of Japan's most lauded contemporary authors. His novel Mizu ni umoreru haka (The Water-Covered Grave) won the Asahi Award for New Writers, and Nigiyakana wan ni seowareta fune (Boat on a Choppy Bay) won the Mishima Prize. He also received the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's highest literary honor, in 2015. He lives in Tokyo.

Angus Turvill's translations include Tales from a Mountain Cave, by the great humorist and anti-militarist Hisashi Inoue, Heaven's Wind, a bilingual collection of stories by some of Japan's finest contemporary women writers, and The Art of Discarding by Japan's original decluttering guru Nagisa Tatsumi. He has won the Grand Prize in the Shizuoka International Translation Competition, and has received John Dryden and Kurodahan translation awards. An instructor of Japanese translation, he lives in Norfolk, U.K.