Ge Fei is the pen name of Liu Yong. He is best known for his Jiangnan Trilogy, which includes the novels Renmian Taohua (Peach Blossom Beauty), My Dream of the Mountain and River, and Spring Ends in Jiangnan, and for which he received the 2015 Mao Dun Literature Prize. He teaches at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Canaan Morse is a translator, poet, and editor based in Boston. He co-founded the literary quarterly Pathlight: New Chinese Writing, and has contributed translations of Chinese prose and poetry to The Kenyon Review, The Baffler, and other journals. He won the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation in 2014 for The Invisibility Cloak.