Chris Taylor

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.

Harvest Season, which is set in the mountains of southwest China, is his first novel.