Igor Ryzov is a business coach for companies across Russia, and has been a business technology teacher since 2006. He runs open and corporate 'Hard Negotiations' training sessions. The Kremlin School of Negotiation won the 2016 PwC award for best business book in the Russian language.

Alex Fleming is a translator working from Swedish and Russian into English. Her previous translations include works by Maxim Osipov, Therése Söderlind and Cilla Naumann, and in 2015 she was awarded the British Centre for Literary Translation's Emerging Translator Mentorship for Russian. She is based in London.