Basma Abdel Aziz is an award-winning writer, sculptor, and psychiatrist, specializing in treating victims of torture. A weekly columnist for Egypt's al-Shorouk newspaper, she was named a Foreign Policy Global Thinker, and a Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute top influencer in the Arab world. A long-standing vocal critic of government oppression in Egypt, she is the winner of the Sawiris Cultural Award, the General Organization for Cultural Palaces Award, and the Ahmed Bahaa-Eddin Award. Her critically acclaimed debut novel The Queue won the English PEN Translation Award and has been translated into Turkish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. She lives in Cairo.

Jonathan Wright is a British literary translator and former journalist currently based in London. His numerous translations into English most recently include, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. He studied Arabic, Turkish and Islamic civilization at Oxford University and served both as Reuters' Cairo bureau chief and as Reuters' U.S. foreign policy correspondent based in their Washington, D.C. office.