Vladimir Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin, including the brilliant novels The Defense (1930), Invitation to a Beheading (1934) and The Gift (1938). In 1940, he left France for America, where he taught at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard, and wrote some of his greatest works, Speak, Memory (1951), Lolita (1955), and Pnin (1957). In 1959 he returned to Europe, where he wrote more masterpieces, Pale Fire (1962) and Ada (1969), and translated his earlier Russian work into English. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.

Brian Boyd, University Distinguished Professor of English, University of Auckland, has published on literature (American, Brazilian, English, Greek, Irish, New Zealand, Polish, Russian), from epics to comics, art from the Paleolithic to the present, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology, but most of all on Vladimir Nabokov, as annotator, bibliographer, biographer, critic, editor, translator, and more. His works have appeared in nineteen languages and won awards on four continents.

Anastasia Tolstoy, a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, holds a doctorate from Oxford, where she completed a DPhil on Vladimir Nabokov and the Aesthetics of Disgust. She is the co-translator, with Thomas Karshan, of Nabokov's neo-Shakespearean blank verse drama The Tragedy of Mister Morn.