Denis Thériault is an award-winning author, playwright and screenwriter living in Quebec. He has long been fascinated by Japan, and Japanese poetry in particular. Haikus were central to his The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman, which was an international bestseller, translated into sixteen languages across the world, won the Japan-Canada Book Prize and was selected for the Radio 2 Book Club in the UK. The Samurai of the Red Carnation once again revolves around traditional Japanese verse, and is set during the medieval golden age of poetry in Japan.

Louise Rogers Lalaurie is a writer and translator from French, whose translations include Louise Mey's The Second Woman, Frédéric Dard's The King of Fools and The Inspector of Strange and Unexplained Deaths by Olivier Barde-Cabuçon. Her work has been shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award, the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature and the Crime Writers Association International Dagger.