Anna Nerkagi was born in 1953 on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, and she belongs to the Indigenous Nenets community. As a child, she was separated from her parents by the Soviet authorities and sent to a boarding school, where Indigenous languages and cultural traditions were banned. She published her debut novel, Aniko of the Nogo Clan, in 1977, and in 1980 she returned to the Yamal Peninsula and the nomadic way of life. In 1990, she started the Tundra School for Nenets Children, where she still works as a teacher, blending traditional and modern forms of education.

Irina Sadovina is a translator and academic from Yoshkar-Ola, Russia. She is the Co-ordinator of Slavonic Languages and University Teacher of Russian at University of Sheffield's Modern Languages Teaching Centre. Her translation of White Moss won the Australasian Association of Writing Programs Translation Prize.