Youval Shimoni was born in Jerusalem in 1955. He studied cinema at Tel Aviv University and first began publishing in 1990. Shimoni is a senior editor at the Am Oved Publishing House and has taught creative writing at Tel Aviv, Haifa and Bar Ilan University. He has been awarded the Bernstein Prize (2001), the Prime Minister's Prize (2005) and both the Brenner Prize (2015) and the Newman Prize (2016) for "The Salt Line". In 2018 a two-day international conference on his works was held at the University of Cambridge.

South African born Michael Sharp lives in Israel where for many years he produced music programs for Israel Radio. He has translated a non-fiction work and four novels including Youval Shimoni's "A Room".