The author, Amir Ahmadi Arian, is currently living in New York and teaching at the CUNY Graduate Center. He wrote this novel for his MFA at NYU under the mentorship of Joyce Carol Oates. He was the translator into Farsi for Cormac McCarthy among others, and a noted journalist. His has been published in The New York Times and The Guardian. His article, "Fragments from a war-torn childhood", published in Guernica made waves for his heart-wrenching and eye-opening story of growing up in Iran.