Maxim Osipov (b. 1963) is a Russian writer and cardiologist. In the early 1990s he was a research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, before returning to Moscow, where he continued to practice medicine and also founded a publishing house that specialized in medical, musical, and theological texts. In 2005, while working at a local hospital in Tarusa, a small town ninety miles from Moscow, Osipov established a charitable foundation to ensure the hospital's survival. Since 2007, he has published short stories, novellas, essays, and plays, and has won a number of literary prizes for his fiction. He has published six collections of prose, and his plays have been staged all across Russia. Osipov's writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lived in Tarusa up until February 2022. He lives in Amsterdam.

Boris Dralyuk is a poet, a translator, and the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is a translator of Maxim Osipov's Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories, Lev Ozerov's Portraits Without Frames, and a co-translator of Pushkin's Peter the Great's African, all published by NYRB Classics.