There’s an explicit redirect to the home page for unknown reasons. Check your .htaccess file for anything that might be doing this outside of WP. Visit your permalinks settings screen. This flushes rewrite rules and regenerates them, ensuring there are no stale rules affecting behavior. Flush any caching, including your browser’s, to ensure you are seeing current behavior.
If none of that helps any, there is code in your theme or a plugin causing the redirect. Switch to twentytwenty theme and deactivate all plugins. After visiting permalinks settings again, author requests should work as expected. Restore your theme, then plugins, one at a time, visiting permalinks and checking author requests after each. When the redirect occurs again, the last activated module is the cause.
