Omer Bartov was born and raised in Israel, where he taught history for several years at Tel Aviv University. Shortly before moving to the United States in the late 1980s, he published two Hebrew-language novels, as well as several poems and short stories. Over the last few decades, Bartov has published many historical studies, including, most recently, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon and Schuster, 2018), which received the National Jewish Book Award and was translated to multiple languages, and Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (Yale University Press, 2022). Bartov teaches at Brown University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Butterfly and the Axe is his first English-language novel.