Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947) was a Swiss novelist whose realistic, poetic, and allegorical stories of man against nature made him one of the most iconic French-Swiss writers of the 20th century. As a young man, he moved to Paris to pursue a life of writing, where he befriended Igor Stravinsky and later wrote the libretto for The Soldier's Tale (1918). Ramuz pioneered a Swiss literary identity, writing books about mountaineers, farmers, or villagers engaging in often tragic struggles against catastrophe.

Bill Johnston is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. His translations include Witold Gombrowicz's Bacacay; Magdalena Tulli's Dreams and Stones, Moving Parts, Flaw, and In Red; and Ennemonde by Jean Giono. In 2008 he won the inaugural Found in Translation Award for Tadeusz Rozewicz's new poems, and in 2012 he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize and Three Percent's Best Translated Book Award for Mysliwski's Stone Upon Stone.