Michael Scott Curnes is an award-winning American Canadian author. To Pay Paul is his fifth novel, and a sequel to his Green Book Award-winning novel, For the Love of Mother (2011).

An ode to the countless cancer victims and survivors who worked at, lived near, or got contaminated downwind from the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State, To Pay Paul marks a return to Curnes’s Cascadian roots. He has long considered himself one of those cancer-surviving “Downwinders,” having spent his formative years in a small farming town located about a hundred miles east of Hanford. Always remembering the words of an oncologist who once told him he “probably shouldn’t count on turning twenty-one,” he is thrilled to have recently achieved the age of sixty. Living in Canada since 1995, and cancer-free for thirty-nine years, Curnes lives with his husband in Victoria, British Columbia.