Vladimir Nabokov was born in St Petersburg, Russia, in 1899. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 he moved to the Crimea with his family and then to England. In 1922 he graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, before moving to Berlin where he wrote short fiction and poetry under the pseudonym V. Sirin. In 1925 he married Véra Slonim and in 1934 their son Dimitri was born. The family moved to New York in 1940 where he worked as an entomologist before becoming professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University. During his time in New York he continued to write and publish works, including The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Nikolai Gogol (1944), Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962). He died in 1977 in Montreux, Switzerland.

Thomas M. Müller, 1966 in Gera geboren, studierte an der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig und an der Kantonalen Schule für Gestaltung in Luzern. Er ist Buchillustrator, zeichnet Plakate und Grafiken und lebt mit seiner Familie in Leipzig. Für die Büchergilde hat Thomas M. Müller die Tollen Hefte Der Hardrock-Himmel von T. C. Boyle sowie Ein Ablehnungsbescheid und die Folgen von Charles Bukowski illustriert.