Franck Bouysse was born in France in 1965. He began his writing career in 2007 after working as a biology teacher. His previous novel, Born of No Woman (Other Press, 2021), has won numerous literary prizes in France, including the Elle Readers' Grand Prize, the Booksellers' Prize, and the Prix Babelio.

Chris Clarke has translated work by Raymond Queneau, Pierre Mac Orlan, Éric Chevillard, and Ryad Girod, among others. He was awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for fiction in 2019 for his translation of Marcel Schwob's Imaginary Lives. Two years earlier he was a finalist for the same prize for his translation of Patrick Modiano's In the Café of Lost Youth.