Roger Taylor was born in Heywood, Lancashire, England and now lives in the Wirral. He is a chartered civil and structural engineer, a pistol, rifle and shotgun shooter, an instructor/student in a highly personalised form of aikido (heavily influenced by tai chi and systema) and, not least, an enthusiastic and loud but bone-jarringly inaccurate piano player. Ostensibly fantasy, his major work - the twelve books of the ''Chronicles of Hawklan'' - is much more than it seems and has been called ''subtly subversive''. He has also written Aikido - More Than a Martial Art, the fantasy novel The Keep, Newman which he describes as ''odd'', and Travellers which is science fiction.