Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a key figure of the Bengal Renaissance. A poet, a songwriter, a playwright, an essayist, a short story writer and a novelist; Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1931.

Anita Desai was born in 1937; her father was Bengali and her mother German, and she was educated in Delhi. Her publihsed work includes Clear Light of Day, which was shortlisted for the 1980 Booker Prize, Fire on the Mountain, for which she won the Royal Society of Literature's Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the 1978 National Academy of Letters Award, In Custody, which was shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize, a volume of short stories, Games at Twilight, and Baumgartner's Bombay, all of which are publihsed in Penguin. She has also written several books for children. She is a member of the Advisory Board for English of the National Academy of Letters in Delhi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. She was awarded the Neil Gunn International Fellowship for 1994. Anita Desai is married, has four children, and lives in India.

William Radice is a poet, scholar, and translator of Bengali, who has written or edited nearly thirty books. He has translated Tagore's short stories and his novel The Home of the World for Penguin Classics.