Monika Fagerholm was born in 1961 and belongs to the Swedish-speaking community in Finland. Her much-praised first novel, Wonderful Women by the Sea, became one of the most widely translated Scandinavian literary novels of the mid-nineties. Two years later, it was made into a motion picture. In 1998, it was followed by the cult novel Diva, which won the Swedish Literature Society Award and Nyland's Art Award. Her third novel, The American Girl, became a number-one best seller and won the premier literary award in Sweden, the August Prize, as well as the Aniara Prize and the Gothenburg Post Award. Katarina E.Tucker was born in the United States and raised bilingually with English and Swedish. She holds a doctorate in Scandinavian Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2003, she won the American-Scandinavian Foundation's Translation Prize for her translation of Sven Delblanc's Jerusalem's Night. After dividing her time between Europe and North America, she now resides in the Netherlands.