Andrei Gelasimov studied foreign languages at Yakutsk State University and directing at the Moscow Theater Institute. He became an overnight literary sensation in Russia in 2001 when his story "A Tender Age," which he published online, won critical acclaim as best debut and went on to garner the Apollon-Grigoriev and the Booker Student Prizes, as well as a nomination for the Belkin Prize. Thirst is Gelasimov's first book published in English. His novel The Gods of the Steppes, forthcoming from AmazonCrossing in 2012, won the 2009 Russian National Bestseller literary award.

Translator Marian Schwartz studied Russian and Russian literature at Harvard University, Middlebury Russian School, Leningrad State University, and the University of Texas at Austin. She is the recipient of two translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. She translated the New York Times bestseller The Last Tsar by Edvard Radzinsky; two of her recent translations are Olga Slavnikova's 2017 and Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov.