Mahasweta Devi is widely acknowledged as one of India's foremost writers. In 1996, she won the Jnanpith Award (India's highest literary award) and the Magsaysay Award (considered to be Asia's version of the Nobel Prize). She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work amongst dispossessed tribal communities.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, New York. Her many publications include Of Grammatology (1976), the translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida's De la grammmatologie. She has also published translations of Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps(1994), Breast Stories(1997), and Old Women(1999), and is currently translating for the definitive edition of the Selected Works of Mahasweta Devi. Other Asias, a collection of her essays, will be published by Blackwell in 2003.