Hiromi Kawakami was born in Tokyo in 1958. In 2001 she won the Tanizaki Prize for Strange Weather in Tokyo, which became an international bestseller and was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 International Foreign Fiction Prize. Her other fiction includes The Nakano Thrift Shop, The Ten Loves of Mr. Nishino, People from My Neighborhood, The Third Love and Under the Eye of the Big Bird, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025.

Allison Markin Powell has been awarded grants from English PEN and the NEA, and the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Mr. Nishino. Her translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Fuminori Nakamura, Shiori Ito, and Kanako Nishi. She was the guest editor for the first Japan issue of Words Without Borders and she maintains the database Japanese Literature in English at www.japaneseliteratureinenglish.com.