Mikhail Shishkin is one of Russia's most prominent and respected contemporary writers. When Maidenhair was published in 2005, it was awarded both the National Bestseller Prize and the Big Book Prize.

Marian Schwartz is a prize-winning translator of Russian. The winner of a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Heldt Translation Prize, Schwartz has translated classic literary works by Nina Berberova, Yuri Olesha, and Mikhail Bulgakov.