Paul Majkut, born in East St. Louis, Illinois, now lives in San Diego, California. He has also lived for long periods in Canada, Mexico, the People’s Republic of China, and the Middle East. For food and shelter, he has had the good fortune of successfully alternating two careers, university teaching and journalism. When he finds university flapjaws intolerable, he accepts positions as a foreign correspondent and investigative journalist. When he tires of barroom journalism, he returns to academe and scholarship.

While on National Endowment for the Humanities grants, Majkut researched medieval attitudes on sin and anti-Semitism at Cambridge and Oxford. As a Fulbright Scholar and Senior Specialist in Argentina, Finland, and Germany, Majkut taught literature, film, and philosophy. He received a Senior Research Grant from the Slovak Republic Ministry of Education to research films of the Cold War and has been a Visiting Professor at the Universidad Autonoma de Chiapas, Mexico, the Doctoral Program (Orientación en Literatura Angloamericana) of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, and the University of Stuttgart, Germany (Institut für Literaturwissenschaft Anglistik / Amerikanistik).

As a journalist, Majkut has won numerous awards for his writing from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the Los Angeles Press Club, the Southern California Press Club, the San Diego Press Club, and the Society for Professional Journalism, including awards for reporting from Chiapas during the Zapatista uprising, follow-up on the “heroes” of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, and a series on East African immigration to San Diego.

While working to eat, Majkut has secretly written fiction and poetry since his teenage years. Three novels, a collection of short stories, and a volume of poetry are now available at Amazon. The most recent novel is "Oulanem."

When he entered the university, Karl Marx thought of himself as a poet and dramatist. He soon recognized that he was neither, but not before he left behind a handful of poems and one act of a play, "Oulanem: A Tragedy." A Goodreads reviewer wrote, “What Thomas Piketty did for the old Marx’s economic writings in "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," Majkut does for young Marx's abandoned, drama fragment. Marx plus Majkut equals Gothic revenge.” Julia Ann Charpentier of ForeWord, Clarion Reviews, recommends Oulanem as an “… unforgettable journey… a superb job using Marx’s abandoned fragment to its fullest potential… highly evocative and chilling narrative.”

“Majkut offers a fresh take on the classic revenge tale inspired by the early writing of Karl Marx… . In a novel written so well, and with such restraint, it’s easy not to feel [the villain’s] steadily tightening noose until it closes as all is revealed—to great satisfaction—in the final act. An impressive denouement to Marx’s unfinished play.”
– Kirkus Reviews