Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) was born in the countryside near Turin in northern Italy. His translations of Hermann Melville, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Daniel Defoe influenced his contemporaries, and the wider reading public. Pavese also worked at the Turin publisher Einaudi, where he went on to become the editorial director. He wrote poetry, essays and fiction, and kept diaries. In 1950, Pavese won the Strega Prize, Italy's most prestigious award for literature, for The Moon and the Bonfires. Later the same year, he committed suicide.

Minna Zallman Proctor is the author of Landslide: True Stories (2017) and the editor of The Literary Review. Her essays have appeared in Bookforum, The Nation, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. Proctor's translation of Love in Vain, Selected Stories of Federigo Tozzi won the PEN Poggioli Prize. Her translations include Fleur Jaeggy's These Possible Lives, Natalia Ginzburg's Happiness, as Such, Bruno Arpaia's The Angel of History, and essays by Umberto Eco, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.