Vasyl Semenovych Stus was a Ukrainian poet, translator, literary critic, journalist, and an active member of the Ukrainian dissident movement. For his political convictions, his works were banned by the Soviet regime and he spent 13 years in detention until his death in Perm-36—then a Soviet forced labor camp for political prisoners, subsequently The Museum of the History of Political Repression—after having declared a hunger strike on September 4, 1985. On November 26, 2005, the Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko posthumously awarded him the highest national title: Hero of Ukraine. Stus is widely regarded as one of Ukraine's foremost poets.

Vakhtang Kipiani is a Ukrainian journalist, historian, and opinion journalist the most famous for his book "The Case of Vasyl Stus" that won the first place in the "List of 30 iconic books of Ukrainian Independence" compiled by Ukrainian Book Institute and Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine with help of voting of qualified voters in 2021. He is the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Istorychna Pravda, the head of the Museum-Archive of the Press and lecturer in Ukrainian Catholic University and in National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He is a recipient of Shevchenko National Prize in journalism and a Honored Journalist of Ukraine.