Halid Ziya Usakligil (1866-1945) was a Turkish novelist, poet, and playwright. The House on the Bosphorus, originally serialized in a Turkish literary magazine in 1899 and 1900, is considered the first modern Turkish novel.

Douglas Scott Brookes (translator) teaches Ottoman Turkish at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Harem Ghosts: What One Cemetery Can Tell Us About the Ottoman Empire and The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem and the translator of On the Sultan's Service, the memoir of Halid Ziya Usakligil.

Merve Emre (foreword) is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. Born in Turkey, she lives in New Haven, Connecticut.