Serhii Sakal was born in Ukraine in 1987 and lives in the United States. He read the Ukrainian classics at school, as everyone there does, and came back to them as an adult in a country where they had not been read. His previous translations are Taras Shevchenko's The Artist, Lesya Ukrainka's The Forest Song and The Boyar's Wife, Osyp Turiansky's Beyond the Limits of Pain, Volodymyr Vynnychenko's Notes of a Snub-Nosed Mephistopheles, Andrii Chaikovsky's After His Sister, and Ivan Franko's For the Hearth.He translated this one because it is the second Shevchenko novella in this series, and because a book written under an order forbidding its author to write deserves to be read in more languages than one.