Never having been one to shy away from controversy, Kristien Hemmerechts is the author of twenty novels, and numerous collections of short stories and autobiographical essays. Hemmerechts used to teach English Literature at University College Brussels and Creative Writing at the Drama School of Antwerp. She has been awarded the Flemish State Prize and the Frans Kellendonk Prize for her complete works. She now teaches Dutch to newcomers in Belgium.

Paul Vincent is a Dutch-to-English translator based in London. He studied at Cambridge and in Amsterdam, and after teaching Dutch at the University of London for over twenty years became a full-time translator in 1989. Since then he has published a wide variety of translated poetry, non-fiction, and fiction, including work by Achterberg, Claus, Couperus, Elsschot, Jellema, Mulisch, De Moor, and Van den Brink. He is a member of the Society of Dutch Literature in Leiden, and has won the Reid Prize for poetry translation, the Vondel Prize for Dutch-English translation, and (jointly) the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize.