Belén Gopegui was born in Madrid in October 1963. In 1993, she burst onto the Spanish literary scene with her first novel, La escala de los mapas [The Scale of Maps]. Her masterful debut bowled over critics, winning both the Tigre Juan Prize and the “Santiago del Nuevo Extremo” Iberoamerican Prize for First Novel. Since then, Gopegui has published six more novels, and her work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Polish, Turkish, Serbian, Finnish and Dutch.

Mark Schafer is a literary translator and visual artist who lives in Roxbury, Massachusetts and teaches Spanish and Translation at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Schafer has translated novels, short stories, essays and poetry by other Latin American authors including Gloria Gervitz, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Jesús Gardea, Eduardo Galeano and Antonio José Ponte. Schafer has received numerous grants and awards for his translations, including the Robert Fitzgerald Prize and two Translation Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Schafer edited and translated the anthology Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Selected Poetry of David Huerta, which was published in January 2009 by Copper Canyon Press.