New York Times bestselling author Katherine Arden is best known for her Winternight Trilogy, a fantasy series set in medieval Russia. The first novel of the trilogy, The Bear and the Nightingale (2017), was well received by critics and readers alike and was nominated for the Locus Award for Best First Novel (2018). The Winternight Trilogy was also nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2020. Arden drew inspiration for this trilogy from her degree in Russian and a year spent in Moscow following high school. 

Arden has lived in many places, including Hawaii, where she spent time working on a farm before beginning her writing career. In addition to her Winternight Trilogy, Arden has also written the Small Spaces Quartet, a series of middle-grade horror fiction set in modern-day Vermont, for which she won the Vermont Golden Dome Book Award in 2020.

Arden explains that one impetus for writing The Warm Hands of Ghosts is the lack of attention Americans pay to World War I. She argues that “the Great War is not an American preoccupation,” eclipsed as it is in the “American Imagination […] by its bloody, momentous successor” (319). Arden believes that World War I deserves more attention and hopes that The Warm Hands of Ghosts will help inspire that.