Author of four best-selling novels, Josefine Klougart (b. 1985) has been hailed as one of Denmark's greatest contemporary writers. She was the first Danish author ever to have two of her first three books nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, Scandinavia's most prestigious award. Her work has also been nominated for the Readers' Book Award, and she received the Danish Royal Prize for Culture in 2011 with the committee stating that she is "one of the most important writers, not just of her generation, but of her time." She's been compared to a range of authors, including Joan Didion, Anne Carson, and Virginia Woolf.

Martin Aitken has translated dozens of books from the Danish, including works by Dorthe Nors, Jussi Adler-Olsen, Peter Høeg, Pia Juul, and Kim Leine, among others. He was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation's Nadia Christensen Translation Prize, and was longlisted for both the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.