Kateryna Sylvanova was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. She graduated from Kharkiv National Agrarian University and later moved to the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, where she worked in a shoe store and spent her free time writing. Elena Malisova was born in a provincial Soviet town in the late 1980s, where she lived until she moved to Moscow in the late 2000s. Growing up, she wrote poems that were published in small local newspapers. Sylvanova and Malisova met in 2016 and together began working on Summer in a Pioneer Tie. Both authors left Russia in 2022 after a flurry of death threats, with Sylvanova returning to Ukraine and Malisova moving to Germany.