After a prominent career as an editor, at the age of 57, Nada Gasic published her first novel, Mirna ulica, drvored, for which she was awarded the Slavic Prize for best debut novel, and in 2010 she published the novel Voda, Paucina (Water, Spiderweb), which was awarded the City of Zagreb Prize and the Vladimir Nazor Prize.

Ellen Elias-Bursac has been translating novels and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s, including Dasa Drndic, Dubravka Ugresic, Ivana Bodrozic, and Robert Perisic. Her translation of David Albahari's novel Götz and Meyer won the National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association, in 2006. A past president of the American Literary Translators Association, she has taught at the Harvard Slavic Department and Tufts University, and spent over six years at the ex-Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague as a translator.