Khaled Khalifa (1964?2023) was born in a village close to Aleppo, Syria. He is the author of several novels, including Death Is Hard Work, longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature. No Knives in the Kitchens of This City was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2013, was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014, and was shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association's National Translation Awards in the prose category in 2017.

Leri Price is an independent Arabic-English translator who studied at the University of Edinburgh. She is the translator of Khaled Khalifa's In Praise of Hatred and Death Is Hard Work, as well as literature from Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, and Saudi Arabia including Sarab by Raja Alem (Hoopoe, 2018.)