Chris Taylor was born in London and grew up in Bristol and Brisbane. When he returned to London in the early 1980s, England was no longer a country he recognized and he went to India. In Kashmir, he heard that China had opened to individual travelers for the first time since the 1949 Revolution. He taught English and studied Japanese and Chinese in Tokyo, and in 1985 he travelled in China for several months, leaving from Lhasa overland to Katmandu. He then travelled in Burma, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia.
A year after joining Lonely Planet as head of the company’s phrasebook series, he coordinated a new edition of Lonely Planet’s Japan guidebook. When it was completed, he quit and moved to Taipei, where he worked as a translator of Chinese to English, before going full-time, writing, co-writing and updating Lonely Planet guides to Seoul, Tokyo, China, Tibet, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Indonesia, among other Asian destinations. At the time he parted ways with Lonely Planet, he was coordinating author of the China, Japan and Southeast Asia: on a shoestring guides.
When a 30th anniversary travelogue retracing the steps of the first Lonely Planet title, Across Asia on the Cheap he had been commissioned to write was rejected by Lonely Planet, he worked briefly as deputy editor of the China News in Taipei, before launching the Taipei Times with several other local and foreign journalists. He later freelanced for numerous publications, and lived in Bangkok, where he worked for The Nation. He returned to Taipei and took up the position of Dow Jones bureau chief, was senior editor of the Taiwan Culture Ministry’s monthly magazine and launched Taiwan’s first English-language daily television news show for Formosa TV.
After working for the South China Morning Post in China, ghostwriting a book for a Hong Kong businesswoman – whose business in China subsequently collapsed – and joining the start-up team for the launch of the Brunei Times, he left for the mountains of southwest China, where he still spends most of his time. Harvest Season is his first novel.