Perhat Tursun is a leading Uyghur writer, poet, and social critic from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. He has published many short stories and poems as well as three novels, including the controversial 1999 novel The Art of Suicide, decried as anti-Islamic. In 2018, he was detained by the Chinese authorities and was reportedly given a sixteen-year prison sentence.

Darren Byler is assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University and author of In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony (2021). His anonymous cotranslator, who disappeared in 2017, is presumed to be in the reeducation camp system in northwest China.