Grisham is a prolific American author who has sold over 300 million copies worldwide. As of 2023, he has an ongoing run of 28 consecutive number-one bestsellers in fiction, has been awarded the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction twice, and has been recognized by the Library of Congress with a Creative Achievement Award for Fiction. Grisham was born in Arkansas, and despite neither of his parents receiving any formal education, they encouraged him to attend college, where he eventually studied law. Before becoming a full-time writer, Grisham practiced law for almost a decade. He also spent time as a politician and was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives as a Democrat from 1983 to 1990. Despite leaving politics for writing, he remains politically active and serves as a member of the board on the Innocence Project, which works to exonerate people who have been wrongly convicted. Grisham has been a fan of basketball since playing in high school and is a season ticketholder for the Virginia men’s team and the North Carolina women’s team.

Grisham loosely based Sooley on a handful of real-world stories: a South Sudanese team that came to play in a showcase tournament in America; Mamadi Diakite, who now plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers but comes from Guinea and played college basketball for Virginia; and Len Bias, a collegiate basketball player who was touted as the next Michael Jordan but died of an overdose a few days after being drafted by the Boston Celtics.