Marcial Gala is a novelist, a poet, and an architect from Cuba. He won the Pinos Nuevos Prize for best short story in 1999. His novel The Black Cathedral received the Premio de la Crítica Literaria and the Alejo Carpentier Award in 2012 and was published in English by FSG in 2020. Gala also won the 2018 Ñ Prize of the City of Buenos Aires-Clarín for Call Me Cassandra. He lives in Buenos Aires and Cienfuegos.
Anna Kushner, the daughter of Cuban exiles, was born in Philadelphia and has been traveling to Cuba since 1999. In addition to
The Black Cathedral and
Call Me Cassandra, she has translated the novels of Norberto Fuentes, Leonardo Padura, Guillermo Rosales, and Gonçalo M. Tavares, as well as two collections of nonfiction by Mario Vargas Llosa.