Paul Thompson was born in Winnipeg, Canada, and raised in Minneapolis. His criticism, essays, and profiles have appeared in GQ, Pitchfork, New York, Playboy, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, among other publications; his fiction has appeared in Hobart. Since 2013, he has lived in Los Angeles, where from 2022 until 2025 he was the senior editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.