Nguyen Thanh Hien was born in 1940 in Nam Tuong village, An Nhon district, Bình Đinh Province in Vietnam, the country central to his literary works.

He graduated with a BA in Western philosophy from the Saigon University of Literature. During the Vietnam War, he participated in the student movement against the war in Saigon and wrote stories for the anti-war magazines Trình Bàyand Đoi Dien. Currently he is based in Qui Nhơn city, vernacularly known as Giã, where he works as an educator and author.

He has written twenty-four novels, twenty-two epic poems, three volumes of short stories and numerous poems, some of which have been printed into books and a variety of which have been widely published on domestic and foreign literary websites.

Quyen Nguyen-Hoang is a writer, translator and art curator born in Vietnam. Her poems and translations have appeared on Poetry Magazine, Jacket2, the Margins, and various literary anthologies and exhibition catalogues. She is a Stanford University graduate, a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation grant recipient and a winner of the Winter/Spring 2022 Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation.