J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940, and since 2002 has been based in Adelaide, Australia. He is the first author to have won the Booker Prize twice, and in 2003 was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. As translator he has worked principally with Dutch and Afrikaans texts: his Landscape with Rowers is an anthology of 20^th-century Dutch poetry in translation. His most recent books in English are The Pole and Speaking in Tongues (co-written with Mariana Dimópulos).

Valerie Miles was born in New York in 1963 and is based in Barcelona, Spain. A former associate director of Alfaguara, she founded the Spanish edition of Granta in 2003, which she has edited ever since. Her research in Roberto Bolaño’s archive, the subject of her PhD, led to the exhibition Bolaño Archive 1977-2003; her essay on the archive won the South West Review's annual prize. As translator she has worked with Juan Eduardo Cirlot, Enrique Vila-Matas and Rafael Chirbes. Her first book is A Thousand Forests in One Acorn, a collection of conversations with leading Spanish-language writers.