Leopoldo Alas (1852-1901) was the son of a government official, born in Zamora, Spain. He attended the University of Oviedo and the University of Madrid, receiving a doctorate in law. A novelist and writer of short stories who adopted the pseudonym Clarín (Bugle), Alas was one of Spain's most influential literary critics. He became a professor of law at the University of Oviedo in 1883 and published his first and best-known novel, La Regenta, in 1884; his second novel, Su único hijo (His Only Son), was published in 1890. He died in Oviedo at the age of forty-nine.

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for nearly thirty years and has translated works by novelists such as Eça de Queiróz, José Saramago, Javier Marías, and Fernando Pessoa, as well as poets such as Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Ana Luísa Amaral. She has won various prizes, most recently the 2015 Marsh Award for Children's Fiction in Translation for Bernardo Atxaga's The Adventures of Shola. In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2014 was awarded an Order of the British Empire for services to literature. In 2015 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Leeds.