Rachel Ingalls was born in Boston in 1940. She dropped out of school and spent time in Germany before studying at Radcliffe College, then moved to Britain in 1965 where she lived until her death. Her debut novel, Theft (1970), won the Authors' Club First Novel Award.

Mrs Caliban (1982) was named - to her surprise - one of the 20 best American novels since WWII by the British Book Marketing Council (alongside Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and John Updike) and Faber's new edition was celebrated by fans such as Marlon James, Patricia Lockwood, Max Porter, Carmen Maria Machado and Sarah Hall. Over half a century, Ingalls wrote 11 story collections and novellas to great acclaim but is still relatively unknown, one of many women writers described as 'famous for not being famous'.

She died in 2019 after a revival of interest in her unforgettable fiction.Patricia Lockwood is the author of four books, including the 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This, an international bestseller, finalist for the Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction, and translated into 20 languages. Her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and was named one of the Guardian's 100 best books of the 21st century. She is also the author of two poetry collections, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014) and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (2012). Lockwood's work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.