Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. In 1993 she made her literary debut as a poet and published her first short story in 1994. She won the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian and was shortlisted for The White Book. In 2024, Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 'for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life'.

Among other major awards and prizes she is the winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger 2023 for the French edition of We Do Not Part. She taught in the department of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts for eleven years before leaving in 2018 to focus on writing. She is the fifth writer to contribute to the ongoing Future Library project in Oslo, Norway.

e. yaewon translates from and into Korean. Most recently, she translated Hwang Jungeun's dd's Umbrella and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts and co-translated Han Kang's Greek Lessons and Samuel Beckett's Selected Shorter Plays.

Paige Morris is a writer and translator from Jersey City, New Jersey, who divides her time between South Korea and the United States. She has translated fiction by Hyun-Joo Park, Ji-min Lee, Soyeon Jeong, and many more.