Brazilian novelist, critic, and diplomat João Almino is the author of three volumes of essays and five of philosophy, in addition to the five novels of his Brasilia Quintet, of which Dalkey has published the last two, The Book of Emotions and Free City. He has taught at Berkeley, Stanford, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the University of Brasilia, and the University of Chicago. Among other awards, Almino won the 2003 Casa de las Américas Award for The Five Seasons of Love and the 2011 Prêmio Passo Fundo Zaffari and Bourbon de Literatura for Free City. In 2017, he was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. The Last Twist of the Knife is his seventh novel.
A. G. Porta was born in Barcelona in 1954. He gained prominence in the Spanish literary world when he won the Ambito Literario de Narrativa Prize in 1984 for a novel written with Roberto Bolano. After a silence of over ten years-which Bolano claimed that Porta spent reading and rereading Joyce-he began publishing novels to widespread critical acclaim.