LEONORA CARRINGTON (1917–2011) was born in Lancashire, England, to an industrialist father and an Irish mother. She was raised on fantastical folktales told to her by her Irish nanny at her family’s estate, Crookhey Hall. Carrington would be expelled from two convent schools before enrolling in art school in Florence. In 1937, a year after her mother gave her a book on surrealist art featuring Max Ernst’s work, she met the artist at a party. Not long after, Carrington and the then-married Ernst settled in the south of France, where Carrington completed her first major painting, Self-Portrait (The Inn of the Dawn Horse), in 1938. In the wake of Ernst’s imprisonment by the Nazis, Carrington fled to Spain, where she suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital in Madrid. She eventually escaped to the Mexican embassy in Lisbon and settled first in New York and later in Mexico, where she married the photographer Imre Weisz and had two sons. Carrington spent the rest of her life in Mexico City, moving in a circle of like-minded artists that included Remedios Varo and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Among Carrington’s published works are a novel, The Hearing Trumpet (1976); two collections of short stories; and a memoir of madness, Down Below. Both Down Below and The Milk of Dreams, an illustrated group of stories she originally wrote for her children, are available from New York Review Books.

OLGA TOKARCZUK is the author of nine novels and three short-story collections. Her novel Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize and she is the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature.