Mela Hartwig was born in 1893 in Vienna, where she went on to have a successful career as an actress. After marrying, Hartwig left the stage and turned her hand to writing, where she developed a name for herself as a modernist and feminist. In 1938, Hartwig and her husband immigrated to London, where she befriended Virginia Woolf. She died in London in 1967. Kjersti A. Skomsvold was born in 1979 in Oslo. "The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am" is her first novel.