Ahmet Altan is one of Turkey's most significant authors and journalists. His first novel, Four Seasons of Autumn, published when he was 27, won the Grand Award of the Akademi Publishing House. His second, Trace on the Water, was banned for obscenity. Dangerous Tales, 1996, became a bestseller and sold more than 200,000 copies. His novels have been translated into many languages.

In 2016, Ahmet and his brother Mehmet were arrested as part of a wave of arrests of journalists and writers following the coup attempt in Turkey. In 2018, they were sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for their alleged involvement in the coup. The verdict has been widely condemned by human rights groups and journalists worldwide.

Alexander Dawe was born in New York and now lives and works in Istanbul. He received a PEN translation fund to translate the collected short stories of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. He worked with Maureen Freely on a new translation of Tanpinar's novel The Time Regulation Institute (published by Penguin in the US).