Åsne Seierstad is an award-winning war correspondent and writer, best known for The Bookseller of Kabul, which has sold over two million copies. She first visited Russia in 1990, ahead of beginning studies in the Russian language in what was then Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. She reported on the country throughout the 90s and lived between Moscow and Grozny from 2006-7 while researching her book The Angel of Grozny: Life Inside Chechnya. Between 2023 and 2025, she made eight extended trips to Russia that form the basis of her latest book.