A medical doctor by profession, Guruprasad Kaginele has been a prominent voice in contemporary Kannada literature. He has published four short-story collections, five novels and two essay collections. His works have received several awards. Many of his short stories have appeared in anthologies published by the Karnataka Sahitya Academy. He has also been the primary editor of two books published by the US-based Kannada Sahitya Ranga. His novel Hijab (2017) garnered both popular and critical acclaim, and was chosen as the best novel of 2018 by the Karnataka Sahitya Academy. In 2020, the English version of the novel was published by Simon & Schuster, India. It was shortlisted for the Atta Galatta–Bangalore Literature Festival Book Awards and was the Valley of Words Awards finalist in the Best Translated Works from India category. In 2024, an English translation of his selected short stories, The Preferred Pronoun and Other Stories, was published by Manipal Universal Press. Kaginele lives in Rochester, Minnesota, with his family and works as an emergency physician at the Olmsted Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota.

Narayan Shankaran has served LIC India as a development officer for over three decades. He is an MBA and holds a PhD in management studies with emotional and social intelligence as his subject of study. He enjoys writing and translating between Kannada and English. He translated a Kannada travelogue titled Sindhu Darshan, by S.V. Rangaswamy, into English in 2019. A collection of his own essays, titled Figuratively Speaking, was published in 2020. He has also translated a collection of short stories by Guruprasad Kaginele, published as The Preferred Pronoun and Other Stories.