The author of more than twenty-five books, Mircea Cartarescu is a Romanian novelist, poet, short-story writer, literary critic and essayist. His work has received the Formentor Prize (2018), the Thomas Mann Prize (2018), the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2015), and the Vilenica Prize (2011), among many others, and has been translated into 23 languages. His novel Blinding was published by Archipelago Books in Sean Cotter's English translation. Solenoid, published by Deep Vellum, won the Dublin Literary Award in 2024 and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. He lives in Bucharest.

Sean Cotter is a translator and professor of literature and translation at the University of Texas at Dallas. A two-time National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Cotter is the translator of 11 books, including T. O. Bobe's Curl and Nichita Stanescu's Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems, which received the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry in 2013. His translation of Magda Cârneci's FEM, a finalist for the PEN Translation Award, was published by Deep Vellum in 2021. His English-language translation of Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025.